Family feud threatens to fold Caffe Trieste
A dark cloud, as big and menacing as a thunderhead, is hanging over Caffe Trieste, one of those special kinds of places that make San Francisco what it is.
Trieste is the premier North Beach coffeehouse, center for poets and artists and odd characters. It is also famous. Caffe Trieste is in all the best guidebooks, a place “where the tourists come to get a taste of San Francisco,” said Shafagh Farnoud, who worked there for years, tending the espresso machine serving small snacks, wine, beer and coffee.
But the cafe is more than a coffee place, it is “the center of Bohemian culture in San Francisco,” said Lawrence Ferlinghetti, one of the city’s most celebrated poets. “There is no other place like this.”
Romalyn Schmaltz, a gallery owner, said she couldn’t imagine North Beach without Trieste. “It would be like having its heart removed,” she said.
Caffe Trieste is at the center of a lawsuit filed by members of the Giotta family, which owns the company that owns the place.
Fabio Giotta, the son of the late Giovanni Giotta — Papa Gianni to his family, friends and customers — is suing his relatives, saying they have defrauded him of his role in running the family business, which is now roiled by “rancor and distrust.”
If a solution can’t be found, the suit asks that the company be dissolved.
“It’s an Italian family feud,” Ferlinghetti said. But if the company that owns the business is dissolved, that could be the end of the 61-yearold Trieste. “And that would be awful, it would be terrible,” said Jack Hirschman, a poet who has patronized the cafe for 45 years.
“All communities have a center, and this is the center of North Beach,” Schmaltz said. “It would be devastating to lose it.’’
Trieste is on upper Grant Avenue at Vallejo Street, a very San Francisco neighborhood. Restaurants, bars, bookstores and Italian delicatessens are just around the corner.
“Those high-rises you see, that’s the new city,” Hirschman said. “This is the old city. North Beach is like a village, and you don’t find many places like this village. What we do here is celebrate life.”
Hirschman sat at a long table one sunwashed afternoon and tried to explain the elusive charm of the place. It has history: “Right at this table,” he said, “Francis Ford Coppola wrote the screenplay for ‘The Godfather.’ ”
When Papa Gianni founded the place in 1956, upper Grant and the Trieste was ground zero of the Beat Generation. The poets, the writers, the thinkers, the talkers all came here.
Though North Beach had a strong Italian flavor then, Gianni took it to a new level. He wanted a coffeehouse like the ones in Trieste at the head of Adriatic, and his cafe became the first place in the West to serve espresso, or so they say.
Caffe Trieste became the community living room, home to members of an extended city family. They had weddings and funerals and family parties. They took care of one another.
“Remember Crazy Roy?” Farnoud said. “He was schizophrenic or something. But he was a regular, and when he got kicked out of his apartment, we took him in and let him sleep in the back room.”
Hirschman recalled that when he came to town in 1974, he had no money. “I had just been fired from teaching at UCLA, and Yolanda Boghi, who ran the place then, fed me for six weeks, free. I lived on croissants and espresso. That’s the kind of place this is.”
Trieste has something else: an essence, like the difference between white bread and sourdough, between grape juice and Champagne. “People come from miles around to be a part of it,” said Fanny Renoir, a regular.
Talk over coffee is the coin of the realm at Trieste. “In the morning, you see all the regulars sitting on the long bench by the window there, reading and talking and arguing about politics, of course, about the city, about the arts, books, poems, the Giants, the A’s, everything,” Farnoud said.
Renoir said she has had one argument that has been going on for 33 years. Many of the regulars are older and weathered by life. But not all.
“I love it here,” said Erica Lewis, a poet who was drinking coffee at a table outside. “It reminds me of the oldschool San Francisco that I wasn’t here for.”
But Caffe Trieste may not survive the family feud. “It could be gone,” Hirschman said. “And after that, condos.”