San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Top 10 coffeehouses in the city for 2022
Even before that philanthropic gesture, San Antonians knew the Alamo Heights shop for its sidewalk cafe setting and a rainbow of cheesecakes in little screwtop jars with the face of the beloved cosmonaut dog Laika on the lid.
But Laika’s underappreciated talent lies in the “espresso” part of its name and the array of drinks that come from it, from a rich shot of Lavazza espresso and a spicy cup of frothed Cuban coffee to a sweet Tres Leches Flat White and a mint-infused iced coffee poured straight from a cocktail shaker. 4718 Broadway, 210-462-6981, laikacheesecakes.com
9. Shotgun House Coffee Roasters
Tucked inside an old sewing machine factory on the West Side, Shotgun House is like stepping into an industrial past for a thoroughly modern coffee experience as chill as a college reading room, all of it propelled by a San Franciscan roasting machine outfitted like a compact steam train.
That roaster turns out coffee beans from places like Papua New Guinea, Brazil, El Salvador and Guatemala. In turn, those beans make nuanced espressos, cappuccinos and bottomless drip coffees, but also a “dirty” iced horchata latte spiked with espresso that leaves all subtlety at the door. 1333 Buena Vista St., 254-913-9031, shotgunhouseroasters.com
8. Folklores Coffee House
Emilie and Joel “Tatu” Herrera were on a mission to bring coffeehouse community culture to the South Side when they opened Folklores in 2018. When the pandemic hit, they expanded the idea of community, turning Folklores into an improvised food bank for area seniors. The economic stress forced them to close the original shop, but they opened another Folklores in Government Hill in 2020 and this year returned to the South Side with a new shop near the Mission Historic District.
Coffee made it all possible, with free-spirited drinks like the Siouxsie with Mexican chocolate and flame-toasted marshmallows and the Vato Rudo, a cold-brew coffee swirled with horchata and caramel, served in close quarters that encourage conversations with the people next to you. 1526 E. Grayson St., 210-455-0360, Facebook: @folklorescoffeehouse; 359 Bustillos Drive, no phone, Facebook: Folklores Coffee HouseSouth
7. Tandem San Antonio
When you roll up to Tandem, you never know what you’ll find: maybe live music, yoga, stand-up comedy, a craft market or a food truck. Right off the Mission hikeand-bike trails, it’s a South Side hangout with tables for studying, couches for lounging and having a draft beer and a patio within earshot of the nearby San Antonio River.
What you’ll always find is coffee made with beans from the cult favorite Dark Matter Coffee out of Chicago, beans that transform an ordinary drip into a sensory trip. For the adventurous or the merely indecisive, Tandem pours a latte flight that flexes its skill with cinnamon, maple, gingerbread and even chile de árbol. 310 Riverside, 210-455-5400, Facebook: @tandemsatx
6. Olmos Perk
The first time I visited Olmos Perk, I was having a rough day, overcaffeinated, jittery and stressed. I felt a hand on my shoulder. “Are you OK?” It was Erin Eaton, who owns Olmos Perk with her husband Tres Eaton. It’s the personal touch that sets Olmos Perk apart, the energy the Eatons bring to knowing their customers by name in a setting that feels like a vintage furniture shop where you can sit on everything.
In addition to a dozen sandwiches and an array of housebaked pastries, Olmos Perk pours good strong coffee made with Katz Coffee beans out of Houston. Creations include a comforting honey lavender latte, a layered jamocha frappe and one of the only Bulletproof Coffees available in San Antonio, a blend of coffee, ghee, Celtic salt, Saigon cinnamon and MCT oil that’s like an IV of pure energy. Yes, I’m going to be OK. 5223 McCullough Ave., 210-492-1104,
Facebook: @OlmosPerk
5. Estate Coffee Co.
Construction on East Houston Street has stolen some of the spartan valor from Estate, infringing on its spare, Prada Marfa-in-the-desert vibe. But the racket and dust outside can’t change the science inside, producing roasts that are specific to the countries, regions, altitudes and farms from which they
come.
Estate sells beans to shops all over the city, but here the focus is on you, and what you get is good drip coffee from the day’s featured grower, espresso served with a sidecar of sparkling water and an iced Kentucky Smoke latte spiked with bourbonsmoked salted caramel. 1320 E. Houston St., Suite A101, 210-6674347, estatecoffeecompany.com
4. CommonWealth Coffeehouse & Bakery
Is CommonWealth a bakery, a bar, a cafe or a coffee shop? The answer is all of the above, and they’re all good. You can get a cream cheese Danish with fresh fruit, a cold pint of locally made HighWheel Betty on draft, a breakfast croissant sandwich with bacon and spinach or a strong French press coffee steeped with beans from Austin’s
Cuvee Coffee.
At the flagship Davis Court location off Broadway, seating stretches from the front patio through the Parisian-style dining room to the shaded pergola out back, which shares space with an honest-to-god chicken coop. 118 Davis Ct., 210-560-2955, more locations at commonwealthcoffeehouse.com
3. The Brown Coffee Co.
The coffee menu’s just 10 lines long at this Southtown shop, but every line counts, because the beans are roasted right in the shop, a process you can watch through tall windows in the front. There’s subtle black filter coffee, showy foam-art cappuccino and an espresso more bitter than your ex. There’s also a “dirty” cold brew with milk, cane sugar and a single giant ice cube like a reverse old-fashioned that revs you up instead of mellowing you out.
The long, shotgun room lends itself to coffee shop officing, with electrical outlets and a view of the coffee bar at every seat in the house. 812 S. Alamo St., Suite 115, 210-274-0702, browncoffeeco.com
2. Eclipse
Coffee isn’t always the most social transaction, just a few coded phrases between you and the barista. Forget all that at Eclipse, the daytime tenant of the wine bar Little Death on the St. Mary’s Strip. Here, owner Solomon Gerges will engage you from the minute you step inside.
The conversation might start with Gerges handing you a sample of the day’s drip coffee, then a followup on how you liked it. Not just how, but why.
What follows is an education, an experiment and an expression of pure joy. I tasted a Kenyan drip, chocolate from Dripping Springs, single-source hot chocolate, a cappuccino with a sidecar of espresso called a “cap and one” and a shaken coffee cocktail with lemon, ice and grape jelly syrup — all in one sitting.
I asked other customers if everybody gets this treatment. “He does this all the time,” came the reply. I can’t wait for my next class. 2327 N. St. Mary’s St. inside Little Death, no phone, eclipsecoffeesa.com
1. What’s Brewing Coffee Roasters
It’s not the roomful of pinball machines that catches my eye at What’s Brewing. It’s the long row of more than 20 coffee beans leading up to the front counter, all of them roasted by a machine in the back that’s fed by warehouse shelves of beans in burlap bags from all over the world.
The beans in the bins are available by the pound at some of the best prices in town. The difference at What’s Brewing is that each and every one of those beans can be ordered as a pourover, ground and brewed while you wait, so you can try a cup made with single-source Honduran or Tanzanian peaberry or Ethiopian natural process beans before committing to a bag.
As a full-on commercial roaster, What’s Brewing supplies beans for some of the best markets and coffee shops in town. But just as important, What’s Brewing has evolved into a classic coffee shop in its own right, a place to camp out on your laptop, indulge in sweet, frothy drinks like the Sami honey latte, buy an AeroPress for home brewing or play pinball like it’s 1980, the year What’s Brewing opened its doors. 138 W. Rhapsody Drive, 210-308-8882, sacoffeeroasters. com
Hannah Guan is a San Antonio teenager that loves math and is dedicated to making STEM education accessible to students all over the world.
STEM education is so important to Guan that she founded the San Antonio Math Include (SaMi) nonprofit organization in 2018 when she was 11 years old with the mission of providing greater access to STEM education to students from all backgrounds.
SaMi provides tutoring, free classes and summer camps for students grades K-12. SaMi currently has active members in 12 different countries: Azerbaijan, Canada, China, Columbia, India, Jordan, South Korea, Mexico, Russian, Spain, United Arab Emirates, and the USA.
Guan is currently 15 years old and a junior at Basis San Antonio Shavano charter school in San Antonio and has been growing SaMi for the past four years with the help of teacher and STEM professional volunteers.
She said the SaMi mission started forming in her mind around the sixth grade when Guan started participating in math competitions.
“These experiences made me realize my potential but also made me realize that we only had a limited amount of resources here in San Antonio,” Guan said.
Guan’s mom was able to drive her to Austin to attend the math activities held by the Austin Math Circle to foster her love of STEM education. But Guan saw many of those activities were Olympiad level math which is not accessible to general students.
That got her thinking and prompted Guan to found SaMi, an organization that would make math accessible to all students both on an intellectual level and in a location closer to
San Antonio. As she researched further, Guan found a significant racial disparity between Black/Hispanic and White students involved in mathematics education in Texas.
According to the 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress, in Texas, African American students had an average score of twenty-one points lower than White students, and Hispanic students were falling behind their White peers by a similar amount, nineteen points.
“The gaps are even wider now because of the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on minority communities,” Guan said.
She points to the 2021 STAAR (State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness) data to support that claim. The data shows in math scores, there was a 20% decline in the number of African American and Hispanic students who scored close to, at, or above their grade level in 2021, compared to 2019. Among
White students, there was only a 9% drop.
Learning in the STEMrelated field is important, Guan says, because “STEM teaches critical thinking skills and instills a passion for innovation.”
“Beyond the benefit of learning science, technology, engineering, and math, STEM assists in the problem-solving and exploratory learning that fuel success across a variety of tasks and disciplines,” Guan said.
SaMi provides summer camps, tutoring and classes, but also hosts events like Pi Day. The curriculum is designed to be appropriate for a diverse student population, to include students from diverse geographical locations and educational backgrounds, and to offer an affordable program that is accessible to all.
“We integrated math-related activities and games in math learning and covered more tangible topics such as the Möbius Strips and Möbius Surprise, Map Coloring and Greedy Algorithm, the Sierpinski Triangle, Snowflakes, and Tangrams,” Guan explains.
Each chapter of SaMi is run by an all-volunteer staff of high school tutors and supervised by college professors and professionals. The organization holds a Tutor Training and Professional Development Workshop twice a year to prepare tutors for their 15week school year tutoring program and three-week summer camp program.
SaMi has also built a network of schools and help with their activities.
“For example, we provided weekly tutoring in the afterschool program at Wilson Elementary School, a Title 1 school, and we organized
activities at the Math and Science Night in Jubilee Lake View University Prep, a Hispanic serving school,” Guan said. “We connect with the teachers of our students to provide resources to their schools.”
In addition to being CEO of SaMi, Guan conducts research with the University of Minnesota in the area of genetic study of aging and age-related diseases – particularly within the state of Texas. That journey started in the 7th grade when Guan was identified by the Duke University Talent Identification Program and took a Genetics class at Duke University.
During the class, Guan read a paper written by a professor at the University of Minnesota and sent the author a research proposal about solving the aging problem in SA, where the number of seniors aged 70 to 74 grew by nearly 60% between 2010 and 2019. That started a research relationship between Guan and the University of Minnesota.
“My research area is the genetic study of aging and age-related diseases,” Guan said. “Recently, I have been working on an accurate and efficient prediction algorithm for age acceleration that doctors can use to identify patients who are at risk for age-related diseases like cancer and cardiovascular disease.”
Recently, Guan was accepted as a member of the American Society of Human Genetics after presenting that research at the organization’s 2021 and 2022 annual conferences.
“The Society provides professional and career opportunities for me to explore my interest in the interdisciplinary field of computational biology and bioinformatics,” Guan said. “I’m also able to connect with like-minded peers with similar research interests.”
Most of Guan’s hobbies are math-related and technical trades, like calligraphy and cryptography as well as architecture design, physics and computer science. The Number Theory is one of her favorite learning pursuits, springing from a love of computer science, which “uses integers to stimulate everything”.
“Unlike other areas of math that can be extraordinarily abstracted and artificially constructed, problems in Number Theory are often so simple to understand, and yet so subtly difficult to prove” Guan said. “My love of Number Theory also comes from my love of computer science which uses integers to simulate everything.”
Still attending high school, Guan said she’s focused on growing SaMi as she pursues personal growth and learning opportunities. She’s planning to become a math professor in the future and plans to return to San Antonio after further education to “foster a young generation that is smart, motivated, curious and open-minded in math and STEM fields.”
“I believe that every child, regardless of their race, family income level, or zip code, should have access to high-quality education and become the bright future of our country. Until that happens for every child, my work will not end,” Guan said.
She also gave a few kudos to her supporters, family members, team members, friends, mentors and supporters.
“I will use the energy generated from them to work with more youth to develop and deliver impactful educational programs and inspire them to use their passions to build a better world for equal education in the U.S. and around the world,” Guan said.