A cafe on the third floor mezzanine of Boston’s City Hall has quietly shut down after its business became unsustainable due to the city’s remote work policy.

Until December, the City Hall Lobby Cafe was run by Recreo Coffee, a single origin Nicaraguan coffee roaster owned and operated by a West Roxbury family. The cafe was Recreo’s second location and sat right behind security at the City Hall Plaza entrance to welcome visitors.

But, as of a couple months ago according to the volunteers at the City Hall information desk, it had closed.

“After seven years there we decided to close because our revenue was negative due to less people stopping by the coffee shop, less transactions, and rent kept going up,” Hector and Miriam Morales, the co-owners of Recreo Coffee, wrote in an email.

“We loved the space and working there, but after the pandemic it was not feasible for us due to less traffic, departments went remote, and less visitors. People got used to do payments online.”

According to the city’s remote work policy, employees can work from home a maximum of two days per week. To be approved for a hybrid work schedule by both their direct managers and their department head, employees must be full-time, benefits-eligible workers in a position that can be performed in a remote workplace. Public school teachers, for example, are exempt from the policy.

A spokesperson said that only 10 percent of the total city workforce was on an approved hybrid schedule. They did not confirm specifically how many city office workers, as opposed to positions like teachers or public works laborers, worked remotely.

“The city has no employees fully remote,” the spokesperson said. “City workers have always worked throughout the city, and even now only are allowed to work remotely up to a max of 2 days. Some positions are only approved for 1 day remote.”

Since the City Hall Lobby Cafe is currently closed, employees would need to get their morning coffees elsewhere. Workers at two coffee shops within 500 feet of City Hall said that their busiest days were between Tuesday and Thursday.

“That’s when all the hybrid workers come in,” one worker at Caffe Nero, located across Cambridge Street from City Hall Plaza, said. “A lot of lawyers from the court come in and get something. We get a lot of City Hall people too, police, firefighters.”

Another worker at a nearby Starbucks confirmed that their busiest hours were usually Tuesdays through Thursdays between 7am and 10am, and that their customers were largely comprised of apparent City Hall or Boston Municipal Court workers.

On a Wednesday afternoon last week, City Hall was all but deserted. Two security guards and two volunteers at the information desk welcomed visitors into the building. Behind them stood the cafe, complete with empty tables and blank chalkboard menus. Up the stairs lies a common work area, which was empty save for two people.

The city also quietly put out a Request for Proposals for a new vendor to take over the cafe in late December. That request closed on February 11.