Why SF is fertile ground for homegrown coffee shops

Why SF is fruitful belligerent for homegrown coffee shops

By Jonathan Kauffman

July 30, 2017
Updated: Jul 30, 2017 8:56pm

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When Kevin Bohlin was scouting locations for Saint Frank, his initial coffee shop, 4 years ago, colleagues told a former Ritual Roasters coffee teacher that a Polk Street space he was eyeing was no good.

The same strip, they said, already had branches of Starbucks, Peet’s and a tiny sequence called Royal Ground. Some told him a marketplace was saturated. Others suspicion Starbucks fans would never respond to Bohlin’s coffees, sourced directly from farmers and roasted in diminutive batches.

Proving a doubters wrong, Saint Frank has been so successful that Bohlin non-stop a fourth cafe, in a South of Market, final week.

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A new investigate consecrated by The Chronicle shows that San Franciscans support locally owned coffee shops like Saint Frank to a grade no other vital city does.

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The study, conducted by Hoodline, a San Francisco news site, analyzed listings on consumer ratings site Yelp. According to Hoodline, that compared information for 10 U.S. cities, usually Seattle has a aloft thoroughness of cafes: 8.5 coffee and tea shops per 10,000 residents, compared with San Francisco’s 8.4 per 10,000. Both total are some-more than double those of incomparable cities such as New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago.

In addition, Hoodline found that usually 24 percent of San Francisco coffee shops belonged to bondage that have 12 locations or some-more — reduce than any other city studied.

Since a 19th century foundings of Folgers and Hills Bros., San Francisco has been a coffee town. Cafe enlightenment here has flourished given a 1950s, when Caffe Trieste non-stop in North Beach, arguably a initial espresso bar on a West Coast.

Peet’s in Berkeley, that non-stop in 1966, was a vital impulse for inhabitant bondage that came to inflection in a 1990s, such as Starbucks and Caribou, before Peet’s went inhabitant itself. In a early 2000s, Blue Bottle, Flying Goat and other Bay Area companies helped popularize a “third wave,” a national transformation divided from chalky lattes and cups of French fry dispensed from a spigot toward single-estate coffees prepared according to harsh standards.

The fact that roughly a entertain of cafes in San Francisco go to bondage does not meant a city is antagonistic to corporate coffee. Starbucks, a world’s largest coffee chain, now has 77 locations in a city. Included in that 24 percent are Bay Area companies Peet’s Coffee (36 San Francisco locations), Philz Coffee (13) and Blue Bottle (8).

Yet, as Bohlin put it, “San Francisco is a fiercely eccentric city in so many ways.”

Alexis Liu, owners of Beacon Coffee in North Beach, pronounced San Franciscans esteem a farrago of businesses a city has. “I consider a normal consumer in San Francisco is really savvy about where they wish their consumables to come from.”

Chris Hillyard, who owns a 28-year-old Farley’s Coffee on Potrero Hill, echoed Liu. “We have a solid tide of customers,” he said. “They like a fact that we’re a area investiture and that we support a village by featuring internal artists and nonprofits and hosting music, things of that inlet that bondage wouldn’t do.”

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But San Francisco doesn’t usually multiply goodwill toward internal entrepreneurs. City officials also order policies that make it harder for bondage to enter a market.

In 2004, a San Francisco Board of Supervisors upheld a law to diminish a widespread of “formula retail,” stores with 12 or some-more locations nationwide.

Some blurb districts, such as Hayes Valley, reject regulation sell stores outright; many others need any such association to request for a conditional-use permit, theme to area approval. The Financial District, Fisherman’s Wharf and several other districts are exempted. So are certain marketplace sectors, such as grocery and genuine estate.

Bohlin detected a abyss of a city’s joining to tying regulation sell when he started navigating city bureaucracy for his initial location. “The volume of paperwork we had to fill out to determine we was not a sequence was equal to a paperwork we had to fill out usually to (incorporate as) a business,” he said.

Considering that 70 percent of conditional-use permits are approved, a fact that several San Francisco neighborhoods have mobilized to stop coffee bondage from opening is a magnitude of a purpose of a internal coffee emporium in a city. In 2003, Hayes Valley activists rebuffed a due Starbucks plcae on Gough Street, a rejecting steady in a Castro in 2013.

Some San Franciscans spin on internal coffee shops that grow into chains, such as Philz and Blue Bottle. This year, Lower Haight residents deserted Blue Bottle’s try to pierce into a space on Steiner Street — reduction than a mile from a Oakland company’s initial kiosk, in Hayes Valley.

City support aside, using an eccentric coffee emporium in San Francisco is distant from easy. Cafe owners pronounced they onslaught with high rents, high salary and a city’s thriving layers of bureaucracy, not to discuss laptop-toting business who buy a singular crater of coffee and monopolize a list all day.

Yet seductiveness in coffee here, as good as a firmness of eccentric cafes, appears to keep growing. Bohlin’s newest cafe, inside his year-old roastery, is usually a few blocks from locations of Sightglass, Equator, Blue Bottle and Contraband, all Bay Area companies. Still, SoMa business keep revelation him they are anxious Saint Frank has non-stop during Mission and Seventh streets since “there was zero there.”

“San Franciscans wish good coffee from a place they feel connected to — that’s also a retard or reduction divided from them,” he said.

Jonathan Kauffman is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jkauffman@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jonkauffman

Coffee shops per 10,000 residents

Seattle

8.5

San Francisco

8.4

Boston

6.8

District of Columbia

4.8

New York City

3.3

Atlanta

3.3

Los Angeles

3.1

Chicago

3.0

Austin

2.9

Philadelphia

2.9

Houston

1.7

Percentage of coffee shops that are chains