Espresso News and Reviews – TheShot.coffeeratings.com

Opening in Oct. 2009, James Freeman finally established a spacious company headquarters home for his ever-growing Bay Area coffee empire here in Jack London Square. They host a surprisingly small café for retail coffee service. There’s several tall stools and tables for outdoor seating along Webster St., and indoors there is barely a four-person window [...]

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 [...]

Locals have raved about this indie coffee and espresso shop for decades. The owner roasts his own, and it’s been in operation since 1976. However, there is no mistaking that the espresso standards here leave a lot to be desired. We may be accused of being traditionalists from time-to-time. But this is an example where [...]

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 [...]

For the last of our brief survey of some of the more notable cafés in Oakland’s Rockridge, this tiny storefront has long been the lone outlet showcasing the roasting that goes on some four miles away at Peaberry’s Coffee & Tea in Emeryville. The café and retail shop shares space with a Market Hall Bakery [...]

It’s time for another espresso review along Oakland’s Rockridge trail. This coffee shop is the kind that only seems to thrive near a university. It’s a more spacious café than some of its espresso-serving neighbors along College Ave. There are a couple of sidewalk café tables in front, some limited table seating in front at [...]

Recently, we’ve had the chance to give more formal reviews to a few places in Oakland’s Rockridge district. We begin with Cole Coffee — a combination café and roasting retail store that has been something of an East Bay coffee institution since it was named “Royal Coffee Café”. Cole Coffee still gets their coffee supplies [...]

This Oakland/Rockridge outlet of the small chain is a little smaller than its SF Fillmore District counterpart, but the standards are the same. Outside there’s a sidewalk bench and a couple of chairs; inside there are four beat-up wooden tables and a tendency for houseflies to gather (just something odd about the building dynamics, location, [...]

Yesterday’s NovoMetro (a rough-around-the-edges local online guide to Oakland) published an article on a new café coming to downtown Oakland called Awaken Café: NovoMetro. It’s scheduled to open in early August with an emphasis on community, slow food, sustainability (and all those other obligatory feel-good adjectives you need to operate a coffee shop in the [...]