Posted by TheShot on 13 Mar 2008 | Tagged as: Café Society, Foreign Brew
This past weekend, the Sunday Herald (Scotland) published an article on Trieste, Italy and some its great cafés: A Shot In The Dark (from Sunday Herald). (Trieste is also home to illycaffè and the namesake for the local legend, Caffé Trieste.) The article touches on Caffè Tommaseo, the historic Caffè San Marco, Caffè Degli Specchi, [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 11 Aug 2007 | Tagged as: Local Brew, Quality Issues
This week, Citysearch.com announced that the votes have been tallied once again for their annual “Best Coffee” poll: Best of Citysearch San Francisco 2007 - Best San Francisco Coffee. And is there anything more effective than the annual readers poll for highlighting all the anomalies and flaws of open user review systems? I know I [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 10 Feb 2007 | Tagged as: Local Brew, Quality Issues
I’m a little slow this time around, but not long ago Citysearch.com announced their 2006 readers’ poll winners for the best coffee in San Francisco: Best of Citysearch San Francisco - Best San Francisco Coffee. This is something of an annual tradition, as we reviewed Citysearch’s 2005 coffee winners. (When you think of it, naming [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 18 Dec 2006 | Tagged as: Local Brew
This newest location of the Bay Area chain is the sophisticated sister to the rest — perhaps a nod to the residential growth in SOMA as China Basin fills. A long, windowed, sidewalk-facing café with dark painted walls, dark wood furniture, elegant lamps, opera music, and plenty of stands selling coffee accessories: Moka pots, coffee [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 25 Nov 2006 | Tagged as: Café Society, Consumer Trends, Local Brew
This old school, Calabrian-themed Italian pastry shop once had a touch for good espresso under its longtime ownership. They owner had been using Graffeo beans religiously since 1985. However, by 2006 they switched to Lavazza beans and began making inferior espresso (though the two aren’t exactly cause-and-effect). I’ve been unable to confirm with certainty, but [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 22 Nov 2006 | Tagged as: Local Brew
Yes, this is the San Francisco legend — a meeting place for writers of the 1950s Beat movement; where Francis Ford Coppola wrote the script for The Godfather; where espresso was first introduced to the West Coast in 1956.
This café is rather old-school Italian to the core — one of the fewer and fewer remaining [...]
Posted by TheShot on 21 Sep 2006 | Tagged as: Café Society, Consumer Trends, Starbucks
If you already thought two Starbucks on every corner was overkill, and if you thought their breakneck expansion diluted their quality like a packet of Kool-Aid dumped in a county reservoir, you ain’t seen nothing yet. At least according to Starbucks CEO, Howard Schultz, who recently said, “[T]he saturation opportunity in the US is not [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 07 Jul 2006 | Tagged as: Local Brew
A recent arrival near Hayes Valley, Caffé Trieste calls their latest café location “downtown” (www.caffetriestedowntown.com). This makes their fourth in addition to their Sausalito, Berkeley, and original North Beach locations.
The new café is a bit like the North Beach mothership: photos of Bill Cosby and Loni Anderson deck the walls, and there’s an Italian mural [...]
Posted by TheShot on 04 Apr 2006 | Tagged as: Local Brew
This motorcycle-themed café is an extension of the adjacent bike shop. It’s a small space decorated with plastic motorcycle toys hanging from strings on the ceiling, there are photos and posters of motorcycles, motorcycle wear and helmets displayed about, and they even use a Snap-On red tool box for offering coffee condiments.
They have three small [...]
Posted by TheShot on 02 Apr 2006 | Tagged as: Café Society, Local Brew
This weekend, Caffé Trieste is celebrating its 50th anniversary in San Francisco. Besides being the site of Francis Ford Coppola’s artistic inspiration for The Godfather screenplay, Caffé Trieste is credited with introducing espresso to the Bay Area — if not also, to a shared extent, America.
They are celebrating by offering 25-cent espresso shots this weekend, [...]