If you drove past 40th Street and Camelback last weekend, you likely saw the folding tables and the line stretching toward the parking garage. PRESS Coffee opened its Camelview location inside the office building at 5090 N. 40th St. on Saturday, September 12, with the kind of grand-opening weekend that comes with free drinks and giveaways rather than a soft launch. It is the roaster's 21st café across the Valley, bringing a new coffee option to this stretch of Arcadia's northern edge.
The easy read is that Arcadia just got a new coffee shop to compete with the ones already here. That reading misses what's actually happening. PRESS's new location adds another option alongside Black Cat Coffee House and Lola Coffee's Arcadia location, with a setup that suits a different part of the day. Looking at all three together tells you more about how this neighborhood actually runs than any single review ever could.
An office building, not a storefront
PRESS Coffee's new café sits on the ground level of a four-story office building at 40th Street and Camelback Road, a property positioned with direct access to the executive housing that spreads across Paradise Valley and Arcadia. That detail matters more than it sounds. This isn't a stand-alone café competing for foot traffic on a retail strip. It's 1,545 square feet tucked into a working office building, with 30 indoor seats and a shaded patio, putting it within reach of two groups: the people who work in the building and the people who live down the street.
In a report for Arizona Digital Free Press, PRESS Coffee's co-owner Jason Kyle described the location as "the perfect neighborhood coffee shop for the residents in the area," which is a fair description of the intent even if the building itself is full of desks rather than living rooms. The café runs a full drip and cold brew menu with breakfast sandwiches, burritos, and grab-and-go pastries, and its layout leans into laptop-friendly counters and wood finishes built for people who plan to stay for a video call.
The location makes sense once you notice what wasn't already on this particular block. Arcadia has coffee. PRESS adds a coffee shop inside a working office building, where a tenant can walk downstairs between meetings. That gives the neighborhood a different option alongside the two shops already here.
The plaza that already had its answer
Black Cat Coffee House has anchored the Arcadia Towne Center plaza since 2011, which in coffee-shop years makes it something closer to an institution than a competitor. The shop brings coffee and local art together, showing rotating work from Valley artists on its walls, with monthly events tied to that art scene. The menu runs to breakfast sandwiches, a scrambler bowl, and croissant or bagel sandwiches like the Caprese Melt, alongside a rotating lineup of flavored lattes.
Black Cat reads as a neighborhood coffeehouse where people linger, not a stop on the way to somewhere else. That's a different kind of stop from PRESS's office-building café three-quarters of a mile away, and from Lola on a Saturday morning.
The brunch shop that kept its downtown manners
Lola Coffee's Arcadia location, on Indian School Road, is often described as the polished sibling to its original downtown Phoenix café. The comparison holds up. It's brighter, the lines are cleaner, and the layout is built for lingering over a full breakfast rather than grabbing something on the way out the door. The food program does as much work here as the espresso does, with breakfast sandwiches and pastries served at proper tables instead of handed over a counter.
The crowd here trends toward Arcadia locals and remote workers who treat the stop as a daily ritual, and the energy leans into the neighborhood's brunch-and-bike-ride mornings rather than a quick caffeine fix before a meeting. It's the shop you pick when the plan is to sit down, not the one you pick when you have fifteen minutes before a call.
Three shops, three different clocks
Put side by side, the pattern is less about competition and more about specialization.
| Coffee Stop | Location | What It Offers |
|---|---|---|
| PRESS Coffee (Camelview) | 5090 N. 40th St. | Weekday work stops, laptop seating, office-building foot traffic |
| Black Cat Coffee House | Arcadia Towne Center, 4730 E. Indian School Rd. | All-day lingering, local art, slow mornings |
| Lola Coffee (Arcadia) | 3950 E. Indian School Rd. | Weekend brunch, sit-down breakfast, bike-ride crowd |
Each offers a different setting. PRESS occupies a building full of desks. Black Cat sits in a plaza with an art scene that predates most of the newer openings in the area. Lola fits the specific rhythm of a Saturday morning that starts with a bike ride and ends with a plate of eggs. These three coffee shops offer options for different daily patterns, which is a more useful thing to know than which shop makes the best latte.
What this actually changes about your week
If you're already living here, the practical takeaway isn't which coffee shop wins. It's that Arcadia now has another answer for a workday coffee run that doesn't require leaving the neighborhood. If your job lets you work from a café for a morning, or if you have a meeting near 40th and Camelback and fifteen minutes to spare beforehand, PRESS's Camelview location offers a place for either. If your Saturday still starts with the canal path and ends with a table at Lola, nothing about that changes. If Black Cat is still your spot for an afternoon that isn't going anywhere fast, it still is.
What's worth noticing is the range of coffee options in the neighborhood: a workday stop, a place to sit rather than a task to finish, and a weekend routine built around movement and a proper breakfast afterward. As of this month, Arcadia has another coffee option in that mix.
If you're weighing what a neighborhood like this is worth to your own routine, or you're curious what a home nearby might be worth given how the area continues to fill in, The Pontikas Team can walk you through it, starting with a free home valuation whenever you're ready to talk.
