A Zine Box and a Full Kitchen. This One Is Worth Sitting Down In.
Necessary and Sufficient's Printers Row location brings the same art-and-community sensibility as the Logan Square window and adds a full breakfast, a mural, and a free zine box by the door.
Artist Kate Vrijmoet started Necessary and Sufficient in 2019 as a neighborhood-building and art project. The Logan Square original is a walk-up window. The Printers Row location, on the main strip of one of the more underrated and genuinely charming corners of the Loop, is where the concept gets room to be fully itself.
The space carries the artist's sensibility throughout. Murals, color, curated work on the walls, small artistic touches that make the place feel inhabited rather than designed. The detail that got me most was the zine box by the door: a little free library for hand-drawn zines that artists fill and visitors take. It is a small thing that says everything about what this place is trying to be and how seriously it takes that.
Printers Row is worth visiting on its own if you have not spent time in that part of the city. The strip is walkable, historically interesting, and the kind of neighborhood block that rewards slowing down. Necessary and Sufficient fits that energy exactly.
The coffee is from Olympia Coffee Roasting Company, with occasional guest roasters rotating through. Execution is more consistent here than at the Logan Square window, though still variable enough that it does not anchor the visit the way a strong coffee program would. The Smoking Gun, a four-ounce shaken espresso with syrup and cold oat foam, is the recurring signature across both locations. Not my drink but not bad.
The food is the reason this location earns a different rating than the window. A full kitchen means a full breakfast: breakfast sandwiches, burritos, and enough savory options to make this a real meal rather than a pastry-and-coffee stop. Lunch runs alongside it. The pastries come from the same outside partners as Logan Square, including Beacon Doughnuts, Tropicakes, and Michele Millan. The doughnuts are above average. The Boston cream is the one.
Necessary and Sufficient is zero waste and pays a living wage. Both things are worth knowing and worth supporting.
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