Espresso News and Reviews – TheShot.coffeeratings.com

Last month — after publishing a few trip reports of nearby Cole Coffee, the Spasso Coffeehouse, and Peaberry’s Coffee & Tea — Luigi DiRuocco of Mr. Espresso asked if we tried the espresso at Oliveto. We last updated our review of Oliveto a couple years prior, so the focus of our most recent Rockridge tour [...]

The Cafe Noir that previously existed at this location made one of the best espresso shots you could buy in the Monterey area since around 2005. Unfortunately, it closed in early 2008, leaving this location vacant for a couple of months. Fortunately, its replacement, Café Lumeire, opened in April 2008 and has been more than [...]

Opening in the Spring of 2008, this remote Ritual location is little more than a counter inside Napa’s relatively new Oxbow Public Market. At first we questioned why the Wine Country needed a Ritual outlet — rather than an expansion of Sonoma-County-based Flying Goat Coffee. But then as we’ve monitored the quality over at The [...]

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 [...]

This dive with barely a service opening sits at the end of an old brick building — still labelled as “Uncle Vito’s Pizzeria” in signage and its black awning. Opening just last month, “Cento” stands for “100″ in Italian — which looks like about the monthly rent that owner John Quintos must be paying for [...]

This café isn’t easy to stumble upon, even if its signature is a rather large Art Nouveau café sign in lights. You have to enter the One Jackson Place center to reach this café, adorned with a miniature zinc bar and zinc-plating decorating its small kiosk. Located in a quiet courtyard surrounded by multiple stories [...]

Jeremy Tooker, co-founder of Ritual Roasters, had a bit of a falling out with Ritual’s co-owner, Eileen, and he’s pursued his own vision of a quality coffee business in Four Barrel Coffee: no Wi-Fi, no squatting start-ups that can’t pony up rent, just no-frills retail coffee plus a roasting and distribution operation. We admire the [...]

Today Blue Bottle Coffee Co. opened up their long-anticipated Mint Plaza café — their first true space (besides kiosks and outdoor carts at the Ferry Building and in the East Bay) to showcase James Freeman’s commitment to freshness. The café is located at a bend in Jesse St. in the Mint Plaza alleyway — in [...]

Previously, we had written about Coffee Bar when it was still under construction. It has since opened on the longest night of the year, December 21 — with limited initial fanfare, as the partners first wanted to iron out some of the kinks that naturally come with opening a new space. And it is a [...]

This restaurant sister to the Tartine Bakery & Café opened in 2005. It has been through one relocation and a few head chefs since then. Yet the food is very good at this long space with an open kitchen and scattered lighting. Bar Tartine inherited the classic two-group Faema E61 machine from the bakery since [...]