Espresso News and Reviews – TheShot.coffeeratings.com

This is one of the latest in a chain of hole-in-the-wall coffee kiosks from locals Kirk Harper and John Quintos. After Kirk and John got out of operating the defunct 330 Ritch Street nightclub after many years, they took their obsession with Lambretta motor scooters and opened Cafe Lambretta in Nob Hill a few years ago. Cafe Lambretta quickly shut down when they ran into snags licensing food sales, and they since opened a series of coffee kiosks across the city. Each is named after a Lambretta model: Cento, Vega, and the location reviewed here, Special Xtra.

The good news is that all of them serve top-notch espresso. The bad news is that all of them are openly hostile towards customer service in the name of prefabricated exclusivity and aesthetics, operating as glorified lemonade stands in dank city alleyways. While we thought Cento was about as rough as Russian toilet paper when it came to seating options, it’s even worse at Special Xtra: there isn’t even so much as a fire hydrant to sit on, and the only place we found to set down our espresso cup was the green plastic lid of a Sunset Scavenger compost bin from the neighboring loading docks behind 555 Mission St.

We honestly don’t ask for much. We don’t need a ridiculous “third place” adorned with feel-good slogans, racks of merchandising, and a Natalie Merchant soundtrack. All we ask is somewhere to sit other than the gutter — on a block that isn’t known for its heroin deals and condos made of cardboard refrigerator boxes. We’re not even asking for a toilet. But at this rate, we can only guess the next outlet in this chain will require descending a step ladder into the SF sewer system where a broken pipe sprays espresso made from untreated water into your face. Dee-lish. That will be $2. Now go tweet to all your hipster friends.

Seriously: who would have thought that a crime scene lacking any seating or bathrooms would ever become a chain concept? To think we used to make fun of Po’Folks — a “Southern homestyle cooking” restaurant chain located throughout the Southeast — because it had the novel idea of turning poverty into a restaurant concept. We honestly don’t know how Kirk and John get anything done, given that they must spend their waking hours doubled over in laughter at what they can make their customers put up with.

Hold your nose and sip your espresso

But back to the coffee…

With the decaying Transbay Terminal parking lot across Minna St., you’ll know you’ve found it when you see the Blue Bottle Coffee branding and a small line of people standing aimlessly in the middle of a sidewalk.

Using Blue Bottle’s Hayes Valley Espresso blend in a two-group La Marzocco Linea, they pull very short, potent shots with a textured, medium brown crema of good consistency and relative size. The flavor is mostly an earthy pungency, but there’s a good balance between sweetness, some brightness, and richer body earthiness: this is no overwhelming brightness bomb here, and it works quite well. On the other taste extreme, it doesn’t taste like dirt either. Served in classic brown Nuova Point cups.

To pull off getting your customers to willingly participate in their own ridicule, you need a very good product. This place impressively delivers on both counts, and therein lies its genius.

Read the review of Special Xtra.

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Coffee is as universal a beverage as you can find in this country, and yet countless special interest groups seem to identify with coffee as it were their own exclusive thing. This identification may have a lot to do with a modern culture that values hype and hyperactivity — and associates that most with caffeine and coffee. As for exclusivity, who isn’t subject to today’s active lifestyles? Perhaps there is nothing more quintessentially American than a mass market of people who all somehow believe that they are uniquely different from each other.

For example, take the ubiquitous dot-com and tech industry workers in the region: the Bay Area’s equivalent of the Detroit auto worker. These folks (and I’m one of them) are marinating in tiresome coffee-themed product and technology names. It’s gotten so bad, there’s even a joke product name generator on the Web that has a coffee-themed option.

We’ve also written previously about the whole velo set — i.e., bicyclists who lay claim to coffee as their official beverage. But espresso bars show up in the strangest of places these days: laundromats, video stores, runners shops, bicycle shops, motorcycle shops, gardening supply stores, pirate radio stations, churches, kinky erotic shops, and now we have the comic book store.

We can only see the coming wave of espresso bars in yarn shops/knitting stores, Bikram yoga studios, nail salons, and pet shops with doggie espresso bars for Fifi. We already have political activists now calling themselves the Coffee Party. With the baseline standards of up-and-coming coffee shops reaching a recent plateau in quality, perhaps the best way for a new one to differentiate themselves and garner attention is to now fetishize it.

Graphic Novelty

This comic book store and espresso bar sits several doors south of the California unemployment office on Mission St. They offer seating among several benches outside along Mission St. Inside there are several old, diner-style small tables and chairs. Plus a lot of plastic-wrapped comic books.

Besides the racks of comics and toys, there’s a two-group La Marzocco GB/5 at the front counter with Four Barrel beans for sale on the side. They pull espresso shots with the Friendo Blendo blend, and here they do a very good job with it: a healthy, darker brown layer of crema and a strong brightness to the cup (which is actually made of glass and metal). It tastes of some wood, spice, and pepper blended with earthier notes. One of the better Four Barrel shots served outside the mothership.

Read the review of the Caffeinated Comics Company.

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Since 2006 (if not earlier), this hole-in-the-wall café has served the Brazilian expatriate community through juices (sucos — e.g., cajá, cajú), savory pastries (salgados), and desserts (sobremesa). The non-expat patrons seem to come here to get their açai bowl freak on, which means somebody is reading all those spam e-mails. All of which puts into doubt whether Western Civilization has evolved any since Juan Ponce de León’s belief in exotic sources of eternal life. (Thank you, Oprah.)

Inside this tight space there are three café tables with stools and authentic Brazilian Portuguese speakers and soccer (futebol) on Brazilian TV. There’s a single, tiny sidewalk café table in front.

Using a rather dingy-looking two-group La Pavoni, they pull “cafe expresso” (sic) shots with a pale, thin crema. The staff is rather clueless about the origins of their coffee beans other than that they’re “Brazilian.” The shots are ridiculously tall — to the rim of the cup — so it’s surprising there’s much of a body at all given its watery nature. Flavorwise, their espresso tastes of muted and diluted mild spice.

Stick to the cafezinho (Brazilian coffee) instead — but even that isn’t very good. Which is too bad, because there’s a lot here to like: from the Brazilian expatriate vibe to the coxinhas. For a country that provides the world with so much coffee — and a culture that gave us arguably the greatest movie of the past decade — the coffee here is a major disappointment.

Read the review of Sun Stream Coffee.

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This corner café looks more at home in Tucson than SF: it’s akin to adobe construction. To think this was the former home of the Octavia Lounge piano bar/cabaret.

Past a heavy wooden door and faux totem pole on entry, it has beat up, reddish wooden floors, white stone walls, beat up tables that look like they arrived from a garage sale, and eclectic music — both new and old. There are a few places to sit in this airy space, but the floorspace is limited. They offer a Melitta bar that generally slows down the service (which is mostly a good thing). Besides coffee, they’re pretty big on beer and happy hour, and they attract a rather quiet and studious clientele heavy on the vegans-with-laptops set.

Using a two-group red La Marzocco FB/70, they pull default double shots. It has a reddish crema with blonde streaks and, with the De La Paz roast they were using, was about as sweet as an espresso shot gets before it starts turning bad. (“Peak sweet”?) While there wasn’t any pungency, deep body, or smokiness, it works as a very flavorful, naturally sweet espresso. Served in classic brown ACF cups. The baristas are also quite knowledgeable and can help you navigate through several great coffee options from De La Paz here.

De La Paz has oddly picked up a number of converts from the ever-excellent Ecco Caffè for some reason: the Mojo Bicycle Café, Trouble Coffee. Even so, the unassuming Mercury Cafe provides a suitable “reference coffee” location for De La Paz — not unlike Coffee Bar does for Mr. Espresso.

There’s a lot of gymnastics going on these days in the name of “Third Wave” and even “Fourth Wave” coffee. But all of these supposed revolutionary innovations of the past few years have, in our humble opinion, done little to nothing to improve the quality of the coffee in the cup. (Even if CoffeeGeek.com’s Mark Prince believes otherwise.) They’ve done plenty to generate bombastic press coverage and give bored baristas new toys to play with, but, for example, the best espresso shot we ever reviewed remains one we had in 2003. Water, ground coffee, a filter, and gravity or pressure: coffeemaking really hasn’t changed much at all over the eons.

All the more reason we admire the Mercury. Instead of resorting to the latest coffee gimmick — the latest machine fad or the rarified siphon bar — the Mercury achieves excellence by just doing the basic things right with a great attention to detail.

Read the review of Mercury Cafe.

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Today the New York Times Magazine blog posted a mini bio-piece on James Freeman of Blue Bottle Coffee fame: The Nifty 50 | James Freeman, Coffee Maker – T Magazine Blog – NYTimes.com. The story behind their “Nifty 50″ (did they hire a former 1960’s editor from Tiger Beat for that?) is to highlight “America’s up-and-coming talent.”

Since Mr. Freeman is not likely making an appearance on American Idol anytime soon — and since there’s still no word on the pilot for Clarineting With the Stars — the Bay Area coffee world fortunately can still celebrate him as one of our own talents. Of course, New York City has supposedly been calling for a while now, and the article claims James still holds some Gotham interest.

Sitting in James’ Blue Bottle Cafe this afternoon with visiting Hawaii coffee author and consultant, Shawn Steiman, we discussed Hawaii’s laggard status at quality retail coffee despite its notable coffee growing credentials. The conversation then turned to New York City’s laggard quality coffee status and how much its quality coffee culture had to be imported from places like Portland, Seattle, and San Francisco — including a number of coffee professionals who hail from these towns.

We previously knew of New York City’s challenges in establishing local roasters — given its commercial real estate environment and zoning laws. But what we didn’t know, and learned from Shawn today, was something he once heard from Gimme! in Ithaca, NY: that Manhattan has no roasters because the island has insufficient gas pressure to support them.

Today’s Times piece also exhumed the old $20,000 figure on Mr. Freeman’s Japanese siphon bar. Whenever journalists turn to price tags for coffee headlines, it reminds us of the old Oscar Wilde quote about knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing. $11,000 Clovers, $18,000 Slayer machines included. (Do they expect commercial coffee-brewing equipment to cost about as much as their $200 Krups home espresso machine?)

UPDATE: Jan. 23, 2010
As if we needed another example of New York City’s laggard coffee culture, the New York Times yesterday published an article on the New York arrival of pour-over coffee: Ristretto | Pour-Over Coffee Drips Into New York – T Magazine Blog – NYTimes.com.

Yes, pour-over coffee: essentially the same process prosthelytized by Philz’ Coffee for the better part of the past decade — and available in Bay Area outposts as remote as Monterey’s Plumes Coffee House since the previous decade. They obviously need a James Freeman in New York City fast, because at this rate Japanese siphon bars should arrive there around the year 2018.


UPDATE: Feb. 22, 2010
Sure enough, according to today’s New York Times, it looks like Blue Bottle Coffee will open in New York City with a Japanese slow-dripper bar: Blue Bottle Coffee to Open in Williamsburg – Diner’s Journal Blog – NYTimes.com. The siphon bar may still not arrive until 2018, however.

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The Mission is one of SF’s best neighborhoods. We don’t necessarily mean Mission Street, however: home to BART’s Plasticuffs Station and a decent assortment of angry heroin addicts. We’re talking about 24th Street — a working class neighborhood with a strong immigrant community, but without many of Mission Street’s rougher edges.

Decent coffee is now on the list of this neighborhood’s amenities. Along 24th Street, east of Mission St., a series of independent cafés opened in recent years — Sugarlump, nearby Mission Pie, Sundance, Dynamo Donuts, and also Haus. (We’re deliberately excluding the coffee atrocities down at L’s Caffé.) These may not be coffee destinations in their own right, but they offer several options for a decent shot, or cup, among these few city blocks.

Not being big fans of the coffee in Germany, the Haus name doesn’t carry much appeal for us. This fortunately doesn’t apply to the coffee here. The former El Mexicano Restaurant converted over to this airy espresso bar in May 2009. There are concrete floors, a tall ceiling, unfinished wood chairs and tables, and a lot of sunlight through the large glass panes in front and back. In back there’s also patio seating among several tables.

They use Ritual Coffee for espresso (their Evil Twin Brasil blend for our visit) and De La Paz for their filter coffee — and there’s a lot of varieties stacked up on the shelves behind the service area. They were also playing France Gall when we first came in, which immediately signals, “this isn’t your average coffee shop.” (And it scored points for good esoteric tastes.)

Btw, Kanye, this is one of the best videos of all time — France Gall’s “J’ai retrouvé mon chien”:

Using a three-group La Marzocco GB/5, they pull shots with a medium brown, even crema of decent thickness. It’s a smooth-bodied shot with strong characteristics of the underlying coffee blend: sweetness, brightness, and the sharp potency of lemon peel. It’s a solid, flavorful cup — but it may vary based on your favorite flavor profiles. Served in classic brown Nuova Point cups.

Read the review of Haus.

The brightness bomb profile

These citrus shots — aka, brightness bombs — seem to be a highly popular flavor profile for new espresso bars these days. And it’s not just this and our last SF café review. While we like the experience of a brightness bomb now and then, we hope that this doesn’t become more and more routine. Sameness is already a very real issue in the flavor profiles among some of the Bay Area’s best espresso purveyors.

As Stumptown exemplified with their Hairbender shots, espresso doesn’t have to have a smooth, rounded flavor profile to achieve lofty heights. That was a good thing and a break from what might be called a more traditional Italian espresso. But these days it seems more and more shots from new, notable cafés target just that narrow range of the flavor spectrum — whether through medium-roasted single origin Central American shots or simple blends that make an all-out assault on acidity. Coffee simply does not advance by replacing one monotone flavor profile for a different one.

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The former One World Cafe needed a serious upgrade, and this is it. Gone are the beat-up furniture and odd house plants that made this space look like a medical marijuana co-op in aging neglect. The place now looks more like a sushi bar, with clean, angular lines, dark and solid colors, nicer wood floors, and a half-dozen bar stools and a few café tables.

They also added wine to their menu here, but the coffee is the real attraction — as noted by the pretty two-group Slayer machine as you enter the space. Yes, it is the legendary, silly-named Slayer machine — espoused by many a barista who can actually say the word “’spro” without spraying microfoam out of their nose in uncontrollable laughter. We know we can’t pull it off. (Perhaps Slayer’s next-generation machine will be called the Slaughter? … That’s “laughter” with an ‘S’.)

Matching Half uses Verve Coffee from Santa Cruz and sell it retail at the register. This additionally makes this café a real asset to this neighborhood.

They pull shots with a medium brown, moderate layer of crema. It is a pretty solid, albeit not exceptional, cup. But be warned: this is a citrus-driven brightness bomb, which isn’t to everyone’s espresso taste. It’s one of the few espresso shots we’ve ever rated with a true dominant citrus brightness to it. Served in a classic dark brown ACF cup.

Read the review of the Matching Half Cafe.

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MSN City Guides recently joined the ever-popular year-end parade of Internet-friendly Top 10 lists: America’s Best Coffee – 1 – MSN City Guides. As if to show Bon Appétit that they, too, can list their favorites without the bother of any supporting criteria, MSN’s editors also took an early holiday and let two additional nominees pass through to make a Top 12 list.

MSN’s editors also let skip the slightly misleading headline of “America’s Best Coffee,” as their list consists exclusively of coffee roasters. The Bay Area irony being that “America’s Best Coffee” is synonymous with a local coffee roaster behind many of the most repulsive espresso shots in San Francisco.

Bay Area props in their list go to local favorites Ritual Coffee Roasters, Blue Bottle Coffee, and Ecco Caffè. None of the Ritual and Blue Bottle cafés made the Bon Appétit list, however. And yet MSN neglects the Four Barrel roasting operations that helped inspire their inclusion in Bon Appétit.

Confused? Good luck finding any reason behind this schism. Although roasting operations and boutique cafés are two different things, neither list gives any indication behind their ranking criteria for why their lists would be mutually exclusive. Compounding their credibility problem, MSN lists two New York City locations (Café Grumpy and Gimme! Coffee) known primarily for their cafés and not their roasted coffee. They even classify Portland-based Stumptown as primarily a Seattle roaster — and their only Seattle-based roaster, mind you.

Taking these lists far more seriously than they do

Of course, we honestly know why. We take these things far more seriously than a more general, mainstream publication. It’s our job to be incredulous when we see mainstream publications not taking the business of rating coffee operations seriously enough.

But these more mainstream publications typically spend all of one day thinking about coffee before they’ve moved on to their next Top 10 culinary subject. In that one day, they must deliberately choose a geographically distributed list to ensure readership representation — not unlike porkbarrel politics. This, and the lack of thoroughness due to time and budget constraints, leads to a number of omissions for reasons other than quality.

The inevitable user comments still amuse us. For every person who identifies a world-class roaster overlooked due to the editorial blindspots of a rushed publication deadline, there is an oblivious lout who never ventures beyond their neighborhood pet roaster and takes offense that the “Badass Coffee” chain (or similar) wasn’t listed. It’s for these reasons that CoffeeRatings.com has taken the deliberate effort to review some of the most foul espresso purveyors in the city. And it’s also why we use stated objective criteria to back it up.

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Today’s East Bay Express published a good, and long-overdue, cover story on some of the quality coffee changes going on in our fair East Bay: Surfing Coffee’s “Third Wave” | Feature | East Bay Express. Its use of the Third Wave crutch is unfortunate, but also par for the course these days. Meanwhile, we will try to avoid becoming too tiresome (and absurd) by limiting our Third Wave mockery to only one post per week.

Luke Tsai’s article was fair and somewhat balanced in its reporting — even if it had to make mention of two of our least favorite (and, IMO, least reliable) Web resources for café reviews: the insufferable gluttons at Chowhound.com and the social networking gamers with arbitrary standards at Yelp.com. We even made page 3 of the article for our routine Third Wave ridicule. The article touches on one of our Third Wave stereotypes, lighter roasts, and even our defense of coffee Nazis.

The notable cafés and roasters in the article include Local 123 (and their Flying Goat coffee), Remedy Coffee (Ritual Coffee Roasters), SubRosa Coffee (Four Barrel Coffee), Blue Bottle Coffee Co. (for their new Jack London Square roasting facility and café), and Awaken Cafe (Taylor Maid Farms). The article also makes mention of notable pre-Third Wavers, Cole Coffee. A number of these truly are a gaping hole in our current review database.

Mr. Tsai had originally contacted me for this article back in early October. So coincidentally, just yesterday I searched the East Bay Express Web site to see if his article had been published yet (it hadn’t). However, a search for “third wave” on the site did amusingly produce articles mentioning third-wave ska, third-wave environmentalism, and third-wave feminists.

UPDATE: Dec 23, 2009
A regular coffee column in the Seattle Times picked up this story yesterday: Coffee City | How seriously should people take their coffee? | Seattle Times Newspaper. Interestingly, the author, Melissa Allison, took upon defining “third wave coffee” this way:

A term coined around 2002 that aims to define an evolved coffee scene in which baristas, roasters and farmers know each other and are connoisseurs of a product to which they’re all passionately connected.

If you go back to our post from April 2006, our debate in the comments with Nick Cho was about how the term “Third Wave” may have been originally conceived about “letting the coffee speak for itself,” or enjoying coffee for coffee’s sake, but the phrase has since been completely co-opted for marketing purposes. That is: what started with more of a consumer-focused perspective was redefined for the convenience of business-focused uses — i.e., uses by baristas, roasters, and farmers.

Note that there is no mention of the coffee consumer in Ms. Allison’s definition above.

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This casual, local café caters to the locals in a big way: to both patrons and employees. It’s located in a large, long building alongside the town railroad tracks at the dead-end of a street.

Out front there is limited sidewalk seating — and an abused Snoopy sculpture, customary for Santa Rosa (aka Charles “Schutlzberg”). Inside they have a back room that serves just ice cream, but the main space is an old, wooden coffeehouse centered around a Sasa Samiac roaster and coffee beans in various stages of roasting: from the plastic bins of greens to the old, brass bins against the wall for storing retail roasted coffee.

They do meticulously date-stamp their roasts here like meat at the supermarket, which is an encouraging sign. Their roasts may lack the gratuitous adjectives and GPS coordinates common to roasters of serious coffee — who decidedly charge quite a bit more than their $12.50/pound. But the roasts here are as fresh as they come — same day, even. We purchased some for home use, and it’s been gassing out for days now.

Their espresso shots, however, leave a bit to be desired. Using a three-group Grimac La Vittoria at the front bar, they pull larger shots with a thinner, medium brown crema that dissipates quickly. There isn’t much body to the shot, and there isn’t much flavor either beyond the basic bold filter coffee taste of spice and some pepper. Served in classic brown ACF cups.

We wanted to like this place a lot more, but they are typical of the older North Bay coffeehouse/roasters. We’re certainly bigger fans of the Santa Rosa installment of “The Goat” just down the railroad tracks.

Read the review of A’Roma Roasters in Santa Rosa, CA.

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