Espresso News and Reviews – TheShot.coffeeratings.com

We continue our series on Seattle coffee culture with a visit to a Victrola Coffee — one of the three “V’s” Seattleites refer to when seeking decent espresso. This location is the original Victrola, though the name here emphasizes their artistic roots and continued interests. It’s an older establishment that exudes some 1950s classicism — [...]

Frog Hollow Farm reserves a rather anonymous place in the retail coffee history of San Francisco, but it was a watershed for the coffee quality in this city. As much as we roll our eyes at the hackneyed and abused third wave term, by many definitions (theirs, and definitely not ours) this was SF’s first [...]

We published our first trip report for Sightglass last July: Sightglass Coffee, Version 0.3. Back then, Sightglass was a tiny espresso-serving kiosk at the front of a vast, 4,000-sq-ft space with a 14-kg Probat roasting operation planned to start in the Fall of 2009. We revisited Sightglass this week to see how much things have [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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”). [...]

Opening in early 2009, this is an unusual space in that most people cannot make it out: “Is it a café? Is it an event space? Is it a restaurant? Is it a wine bar?” Well, it’s all of the above inside an old, long, barn-like structure across from the diploma factory California Culinary Academy [...]

This unusual café is situated in the 19th century Octagon — the last surviving remnant of the historic Cooper House complex, which was destroyed in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. Looking at the aging masonry of the outside façade, you can see a little as to why the rest didn’t make it. Manthri Srinath, owner [...]

Holy crap. This is one of those rare finds where a small town and a strip mall can produce some outstanding coffee and espresso that competes with the best. Although we were aware of Coffee Cat’s elevated reputation among the Scotts Valley locals when passing through, at first we were guilty of dismissing it relative [...]

Thanks to a reader tip (which are always welcome and encouraged, btw), we were alerted to the opening this week of Sightglass Coffee in one of the danker parts of SOMA. Note that by “opening” we mean “unlocked” — and not much more than that. If this sounds a lot like the “modest” opening of [...]