The New England Coffee Café and Store reopened its doors in Malden on September 14, ending a nearly four-month closure and kicking off a milestone year: 40 years of serving the community from the same storefront.

The café closed on May 19 after a traffic accident caused structural damage to the building. With repairs now complete, it's back to its regular hours — Monday through Friday, 7 a.m. to 2 p.m., closed weekends — serving freshly roasted coffee, whole beans by the pound, and baked goods from its location at 108 Charles St. To mark the reopening, New England Coffee's sampling truck was on-site from 9 to 11 a.m., handing out free coffee samples to returning regulars and first-time visitors alike.

The retail café's roots go back further than most people probably realize standing in line for a cup. New England Coffee itself traces to 1916, when the New England Tea & Coffee Company was founded in Boston — coffee delivered by horse-drawn wagon until the company bought its first gasoline truck in 1918. The business moved north to 100 Charles Street in Malden in 1966, and its flagship retail store — the same café that just reopened — opened its doors in 1986, serving factory-fresh coffee drinks to the neighborhood ever since. The Kaloyanides family's second generation ran the company from the late 1940s into the 1990s, and its third generation took over in 1996, before New England Coffee was acquired by Reily Foods Company in 2013; the brand marked its 100th anniversary as a company in 2016, and now Malden's café is marking 40 years of its own.

For Chelsea readers, Malden sits just up the road — close enough that a reopened neighborhood coffee institution, freshly repaired and celebrating four decades in business, is worth the short drive for a cup and a look at a genuinely old piece of the region's coffee history.