Father of the Anthora.

Leslie Buck did not set out to create an icon. He was a Holocaust survivor, a Czechoslovakian immigrant, and a door-to-door salesman who understood something essential about New York City: its rhythms ran on coffee. In the 1960s, while working as marketing director for the Sherri Cup Company, he noticed that Greek-owned diners dominated the city’s takeout trade. So he designed a paper cup as a gesture of respect—Aegean blue and white, flanked by amphorae, adorned with a friendly, slightly formal greeting: “We Are Happy to Serve You.” New Yorkers recognized themselves in it—fast, warm, tired, tough, grateful for a hot cup on the go. Buck never trademarked the design. He never earned royalties. But he gifted the city a symbol more enduring than most works of public art.

By the 1980s and 1990s, the Anthora paper coffee cup had migrated from diner counters to film sets, magazine covers, and museum showcases. It became shorthand for New Yorkness—as immediate and unmistakable as a yellow cab or a steam plume rising from a Midtown grate. Buck, ever modest, considered it simply good marketing, but the city treated it as folk art, vernacular design elevated by ubiquity and affection. His creation spoke to the lives of everyday New Yorkers: cops on midnight shifts, cabbies grabbing a quick cup, students rushing to class, night owls walking home as the sun came up. When Buck died in 2010, newspapers remembered him not as an executive, but as the man who designed the cup that defined a metropolis. The Anthora endures because it isn’t just a container—it’s a cultural touchstone, a small paper monument to the immigrant imagination that built New York.

Dedicated to preserving the legacy of the iconic Anthora coffee cup – a true symbol of New York City’s street culture, corner delis, and daily rituals – NY Coffee Cup celebrates its enduring design, cultural significance, and place in coffee history, both in NYC and beyond.