A bright pink coffee shop is not what most people would expect to find outside the oil fields near Odessa, Texas – but business is booming.
Pickups full of workers are bumper-to-bumper before dawn and inside scantily-clad baristas serve almost exclusively male customers – roughnecks looking for strong drinks from hot women before grueling manual labor in the unforgiving fields.
Boomtown Babes Espresso is the brainchild of Nyssa Gray, a Seattle native who grew up in the shadow of Starbucks and cut her teeth in the Pacific Northwest coffee industry – including managing a lingerie-themed stand called Hot Chick-a-Latte.
She had recognized the potential of coffee stands with sexy service, and when she learned about oil and gas boomtowns she suspected she had hit upon a winning combination.
‘I knew I wanted to open a stand, but obviously Seattle is a very saturated market … and then I heard about guys working hitches on the oil fields in North Dakota,’ Gray, now 36, tells DailyMail.com.
‘They would work two weeks on, two weeks off, go from Seattle to North Dakota, make a ton of money and then come back – and at the time, the ratio was 100 guys for every girl. So I’m like, “That is perfect.”’
North Dakota infrastructure was struggling at the time to keep up with the boom; there wasn’t even enough housing for oil field workers and others flocking to the area. So Gray put her name down on an apartment list and when one opened in 2013, threw her belongings in a U-haul and drove out to the flat midwestern expanse.
What she found upon arrival, she says, was the ‘Wild West times a million’.
Nyssa Gray, now 36, opened her first location (pictured) in 2013 in Williston, North Dakota – which she describes as ‘insane’ and ‘Wild West times a million’ at the time
As servers cater to boomtown clientele, Gray says, ‘the average customer is just an overworked oil field guy coming in just to see a pretty face, pretty smile, have a little bit of fun conversation and get a coffee’
The man to woman ratio was 100 to 1 at the time she arrived during North Dakota’s oil boom, Gray says, and she initially had to ‘import girls in’ from elsewhere, providing housing as well
‘This was when there was a massive boom happening, in 2012, 2013; there were men just sleeping in the Walmart parking lot making over $100,000 a year,’ Gray says. ‘It was just insane.’
It was also a ‘no-brainer’, she says, to launch a business advertising the region’s ‘breast coffee’ for ‘overworked men – bring some sexy women in’ to cater to the roughnecks while ‘super hyped up, acting bubbly, joking around.’
She opened up a small pink stand in Williston, North Dakota, and dreamt of staffing it with barely-dressed baristas.
Local authorities put a damper on her plans, however, mandating that employees dress more modestly – outfits with Spandex shorts and tank tops, more ‘Hooters,’ she says, than strip club.
She also had to cast a wide net for workers, given the low man-to-woman ratio and relatively absent glamor factor in the barren North Dakota locality.
‘I used to import girls in,’ she laughs. ‘I had a big house in North Dakota that I paid like $6,000 a month for, and I had a bunch of women living with me at once … I think, at one point, there were 12 employees.
‘I mean, the boom happened in North Dakota, and there wasn’t enough apartments or anything, so there was nowhere for anyone to live. So it’s not like you could just be like, “Hey, come work for me;” you had to provide housing.’
Once she found the workers and opened Boomtown Babes – albeit a slightly more chaste version that she’d originally anticipated – the business took off.
Her attractive employees were cleaning up in tips; barista Marisa Randock, one of the imports from Washington State, told the Grand Forks Herald in 2013 that she averaged $200 to $300 in tips during a four-hour shift – but emphasized the windfall wasn’t all based on looks.
‘You have to have a nice, awesome personality,’ she said.
Gray says it was ‘no-brainer’ to launch a business advertising the ‘breast coffee’ for ‘overworked men – bring some sexy women in’ to cater to the roughnecks while ‘super hyped up, acting bubbly, joking around’
Often calling themselves ‘baberistas,’ the workers at Boomtown Babes Espresso serve drinks with names like The Driller, Sweet Crude, Gold Digger, Oil Spill, Big Rig, Black Gold and Day Shift; sizes vary from 12 to 32 ounces
The most expensive Boomtown Babes drink is 32 ounces, costs $9.25 and is called Back to Tripping – involving six shots, chocolate, Irish cream, 2% milk and half and half. Then there’s the Pipeliner Pack which, for $9.50, gets workers a 24-ounce drink and a muffin
Boomtown Babes’ runaway success prompted Gray to dream bigger and further, so she followed the oil – and the boomtowns.
In 2018, as the industry exploded in West Texas, she opened her first hot-pink drive-through coffee barn in Odessa near the local Goodwill.
There were no worker wardrobe restrictions like those that plagued her in North Dakota, she tells DailyMail.com.
‘Odessa, anything goes there,’ she says. ‘That oil field is a lot more sexual, for sure.’
She found an equally wild – if not wilder vibe – in Texas; after opening the first location, she opened a second in Odessa ‘five minutes apart to get the overfill.’
The lines of trucks and patient hocking she experienced are similar to that of ‘Babes n Brew’ – a fictitious cafe with bikini-wearing baristas featured in Paramount+’s Landman that was inspired by Gray’s company.
After living through two oil and gas booms in different states, Gray says of Thornton’s new show Landman: ‘I know exactly what they’re talking about. I’m like, “I was there”’
The oil and gas industry in West Texas’ Permian Basin, pictured, took off as North Dakota’s boom eased, and the Lone Star State serves as the setting for new series Landman; Gray says the show mirrors real life during the boom days
‘Honestly, we’re so busy, you kind of have to get [customers] out within like a minute period,’ she says.
‘The average customer is just an overworked oil field guy coming in just to see a pretty face, pretty smile, have a little bit of fun conversation and get a coffee,’ says Gray – though the entrepreneur concedes it hasn’t all been smooth sailing.
‘Oil booms bring a lot of crime, lots of money, lots of everything. You name it – I’ve seen it all,’ she says.
About 10 years ago in North Dakota, ‘someone did rob us at knifepoint … we did take shifts watching the coffee shop when girls would open,’ says Gray.
For their safety, Gray said she and other employees would park directly in front of the stand to be ready in case of trouble at the beginning of shifts.
‘It was kind of scary, because we were located – or we are still located – in a hotel parking lot. So there would be a lot of roughnecks and stuff living there, but also people that did drugs.
‘There’s also a lot of drugs on oil fields,’ she says. ‘When people make money, it just brings everything: crime, drugs, sex … it was sketchy.’
Customers fixated on specific baristas have also occasionally proved problematic, she says.
Gray expanded Boomtown Babes to Texas in 2018, opening her first stand (pictured) in Odessa, a place where she says ‘anything goes’ and where restrictions on her employees’ wardrobes were more lax than in North Dakota
Boomtown Babes Espresso’s social media accounts feature pictures, selfies and videos of the lingerie-clad workers, who strive to display ‘bubbly’ behavior with a smile in addition to wearing saucy outfits
Gray says that there have been occasional ‘scary’ moments at her Boomtown Babes location, including a knifepoint robbery and ‘a couple’ of instances in which her workers had to call police
‘There would be guys that were a little more obsessed,’ she says, necessitating ‘shutting the window on them’ and, ‘if it gets to be too much, calling the police.’
She emphasizes that’s only happened a ‘couple of times’ during the decade-plus she’s run the business – and she’s also not done identifying new boomtown opportunities.
‘I’m trying to expand to New Mexico,’ she says, where there’s ‘tons of oil’ – though she coyly won’t reveal the town.
Now based in Austin, Gray has launched roasting and catering businesses in addition to the eye-candy coffee stands, and she says Landman has ‘definitely given us a boost’ that she intends to ‘tap into.’
She has also watched Landman with great interest – and amusement.
‘I know exactly what they’re talking about,’ she says. ‘I’m like, “I was there”.’
