Trip Report: Mojo Bicycle Café
Posted by TheShot on 12 Jun 2008 | Tagged as: Café Society, Local Brew, Roasting
This combination food/espresso café and bike shop sits across the street of The Independent (née The Kennel Club, for those around long enough to remember). They have some nice, open air seating along the dingier Divisadero St. sidewalk, and there are several indoor café tables. The menu includes beer, wine, and sandwiches, but they take their coffee the most seriously out of their non-bike consumables. They even offer private label biker roasts from Ecco Caffè.
And yes, there’s a whole bike shop in the back. We never understood what bicycles had to do with espresso. Yet there are various biking-and-coffee-themed cafés, cafés with bicycle racing teams, coffee accessories designed just for bikers, charitable organizations linking coffee and biking, etc. Some bikers even believe that they have a special affinity for coffee that many non-bikers do not. But generally none of these people I know have ever met any school bus drivers. Talk about a special affinity: just think what 5 a.m. wake-up calls followed by dozens of screaming kids in a backseat that stretches for miles will do to you every day without the aid of good espresso every morning.
Furthermore, when I get on a bicycle, I don’t feel a sudden, unusual craving for coffee. In fact, if I’m about to go on a big weekend bike ride, I often find myself consuming big plates of rigatoni as if I was just rescued from a shipwreck (i.e., carbo-loading). So why is it that we have so many bicycle cafés but no bicycle trattorias?
No matter, this is a coffee site…right? They have a two-group La Marzocco Linea behind the pastry case — although they’re about to move things around to showcase all things coffee in one corner.
Using the Linea, they pull a shot with a mottled medium and dark brown crema of decent thickness. The barista smelled the cup before serving it, which is a good sign, and the unique smell of Ecco roasts is a treat in SF. It’s a modest-sized shot with a lighter body — not thick or syrupy in the least bit, but not thin or watery either. It has an interesting and robust flavor reflecting their use of fresh Ecco Caffè beans. Served in classic brown, thick-walled Nuova Point cups.
Read the review of Mojo Bicycle Café.
2 Comments »
on 13 Jun 2008 at 2:46 am -05:00T 1.Billy Bob said …
One connection - cyclists on group rides will often schedule a refreshment stop on their route. Coffee shops can be perfect.
In a regular group, rest stop locations get discussed and they can get winnowed down to one or two favorites pretty quickly.
Good bike parking can be an important factor.
on 22 Jun 2008 at 4:31 pm -05:00T 2.Adam D said …
It’s a very common connection, biking and espresso. My own bosses (who opened the Atomic Cafe in Beverly, MA) were professional cyclists before they opened a cafe, which they intended to be a bike shop/cafe before its identity got slimmed down to just cafe. Plenty of bikers use coffee as an energy boost to get a little edge in a race over their usual, non-caffeinated performance level.