Mention the establishment called Larry Flynt’s Hustler Club of New York, and the first thing that springs to mind is unlikely to be coffee.

That may be changing.

Every weekday morning, thousands of what the strip club calls its “perfect customers” – men who live or work on the East Side – pass the coffee cart on the corner of 57th Street and Lexington Avenue.

“We thought this was a very good way to attract the successful businessman, who has a large expense account and can afford to entertain in a very upscale surrounding,” the director of marketing for the club, Steven Karel, said. “He, along with other workers, grabs his coffee on the way to work every morning.”

And there, on the side of a 10-ounce, 65-cent cup of coffee, is an advertisement for Larry Flynt’s Hustler Club, an “Adult Cabaret” way across town at 51st Street and Twelfth Avenue.

The Hustler club, whose coffee cups hit the streets last month, is thought to be the first strip club to use a cup of coffee as a billboard.

The picture is no sexier than a typical advertisement for a bottle of shampoo: a blond woman looks over her shoulder, with a coy if not bored expression on her face. “New York’s erotic/exotic adult cabaret,” the cup reads.

Coffee drinkers in the area, mainly financial traders, gave mixed reviews outside the building at 135 E. 57th St., which houses the brokerage firm Cantor Fitzgerald, the private wealth-management group Guggenheim Partners, and other financial-services companies.

“We work in a very testosterone-driven environment, so you’d probably get props for bringing that in,” a stock trader, Matt Graham, said. He declined to reveal the name of his employer.

Mr. Graham had first seen the cup at his office earlier in the week. His colleagues, he said, were not offended.

“But you couldn’t bring that into Goldman,” he said, referring to the investment bank Goldman Sachs.

The company that sells the cups, Encompass Media Group, gives coffee vendors good reason to use cups with advertising: It gives them the cups for free or at a heavily discounted price.

The owner of a company that operates many of the coffee carts around the city, DVC Vending, said he has received only a few complaints, from delis mainly, about the cups with the Hustler advertisement on them. “We were told where to distribute them,” Mark Cirino said. “After the first day, though, we cut back on selling them.”

Discounted cups, no matter what the advertisement, are a great incentive for vendors, whose business costs have risen as their revenue has declined, thanks largely to the popularity of coffeehouses like those of the Starbucks chain. In the past year, the price of lids increased $5 a case, according to Mr. Cirino, while vendors generally charge around 50 cents for a 10-ounce cup of coffee. A box of 1,000 cups without advertising costs $60, or twice as much as a box of the 10-ounce cups with advertising, he said.

According to Mr. Cirino, that adds up to a saving of approximately $1,500 a year for a typical vendor, which translates into sales of 50,000 cups a year.

The java-with-Hustler discount is not enough for all vendors, however. A block north, at 58th Street and Lexington, Sherin Fahmy has been selling coffee since she came to New York from Egypt 17 years ago. A Muslim who wears a white headscarf, Ms. Fahmy is as dismayed at the cup with the Hustler Club advertisement as she is at her thinning profit margins. She said she is more aggrieved by the product the advertisement is trying to sell than by the ad itself.

“This club is not good,” Ms. Fahmy said in faltering English. “This” – she picks up the cup and sets it down – “any religion is not supposed to not use this.”