San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
A new era for coffee
S.F. baristas lift lattes with orange zest and more. And cafe owners usher in a wave of inclusion.
Coffee was central to Santana Tapia’s childhood in San Francisco. Every night at their home, her Mexican family would drink cups of cafecito and eat pan dulce while they talked about their day.
But as a transgender Latina adult in San Francisco, the city’s cafes have rarely felt like welcome, accessible spaces. She watched as the affordable coffee shops of an earlier San Francisco were supplanted by trendy thirdwave shops selling $6 oat milk lattes and longed for a safe gathering space in her native city.
That’s why she and co-owners JoJo Ty and Shannon Amitin, who are also transgender, opened their own coffee shop last week at the La Cocina Municipal Marketplace in the Tenderloin. Called Fluid, the worker-owned cafe is devoted to unapologetically celebrating trans and queer identity as much as serving a great cup of coffee.
Fluid is part of a wave of new Bay Area coffee shops run by people who feel like they’ve been historically underrepresented in high-end coffee, such as people of color and queer people, and are intent on centering culture and identity in their businesses. It’s a significant shift in an industry dominated by white owners, and one that’s long struggled with diversity and inclusion. Abanico Coffee Roasters, which opened in the Mission in May, highlights drinks from owner Ana Valle’s native El Salvador. The Bayview’s new Tallio’s Coffee & Tea employs people who live in the neighborhood and names its roasts after communities of color. The queer-owned Milk SF, which opened on Aug. 6 and carries the name of Harvey Milk, will host drag shows and feature LGBTQ art.
These new cafes are far from the only minority-owned, communitydriven coffee businesses in the Bay Area, but they’re a sign of growing diversity in the local coffee world. They join the ranks of Oakland’s Black-owned Red Bay Coffee and its mission to diversify coffee, and worker-owned cooperative cafes Alchemy in Berkeley and Hasta Muerte Coffee in Oakland, among others.
Several of the newer cafes describe themselves as fourth-wave coffee, which integrates thoughtful sourcing and social justice into a more community-focused mission. The aim: a “reclamation of coffee culture,” said Dee Derisse, who with co-owner Natasha Podogova, opened Hey Neighbor cafe in San Francisco’s Portola neighborhood in June.
“We want to emphasize smaller roasters, Black roasters, African roasters, Indigenous women — just putting a different face to what coffee is instead of white and male,” said Derisse, a Haitian American filmmaker and former Four Barrel barista. “I’m just trying to be something different, like a breath of fresh air.”
At Abanico Coffee Roasters in the
Mission, Valle is serving the coffee she grew up drinking with her grandmother in El Salvador. There’s the classic cafe con leche, sweetened with condensed milk and spiced with cinnamon, and the Salvadoran horchata, brewed with morro seed, which is native to El Salvador and has a mild, floral flavor. Yes, you can order a straightforward cortado or cold brew — but they’re notably listed on the second half of Abanico’s menu, after the Spanish names of Valle’s signature drinks.
It’s no accident that Valle opened her first cafe in the Mission. Valle was born in El Salvador and moved to the United States as a 7-year-old. On weekends, she and her parents would go from Daly City to the Mission to buy groceries, to eat familiar food at restaurants and to speak their native language.
“This is where my parents were welcomed and were able to access resources,” she said of the predominantly Latino neighborhood. “Making that connection was important to me.
“I didn’t want to just open a coffee shop and serve lattes and something they can get down the street. I wanted to bring that personal touch to it,” she added.
Other cafes similarly have menu items that reflect identity. Fluid serves a cafe de olla, the traditional Mexican coffee drink brewed in a clay pot, in homage to Tapia’s heritage, and a calamansi drink, a nod to Ty’s Filipino roots.
Calaca Coffee co-owner Christian Soto’s family is from Guadalajara, Mexico, while co-owner José Rodríguez’s father is from Mexico City. At their coffee truck in Crockett, they serve a twist on family horchata recipes: a cinnamon cold brew topped with vegan horchata foam. They also serve mochi conchas, a way of “meshing two different worlds,” Rodríguez said.
The beans themselves also play into the role of being a fourth-wave cafe. Calaca Coffee serves Proyecto Diaz Coffee, which sources beans from the owner of the roaster’s family farm in Oaxaca, Mexico. Fluid is using coffee from two trans-owned companies, Queer Wave Coffee in Oakland and Maquina Coffee Roasters in Pennsylvania, as well as beans from LGBTowned Equator Coffee & Teas in San Rafael.
Getting to this point hasn’t been easy; several of these owners said it
felt harder to break into the coffee business as people of color. Soto and Rodríguez love coffee and are running Calaca on the side while holding down full-time jobs, Rodríguez at an electric scooter company and Soto at Simco Restaurants in San Francisco. When the childhood friends who grew up in the Bay Area decided to open a cafe, they were dismayed hearing about the amount of capital and connections it would require. They didn’t see many other minority-owned cafes and impostor syndrome creeped in — a feel
ing that they didn’t belong. It took them several years to save up $10,000 to open their tiny coffee truck in a parking lot in Contra Costa County, painting the lot’s drab concrete walls with bright colors and images of plants reminiscent of their visits to Mexico.
The owners of Fluid, who don’t have enough funds yet to buy an espresso machine, said that particularly as immigrants, opening a business in San Francisco felt out of reach. They were lucky to get connected with La Cocina, which helps immigrant and low-income entrepreneurs start businesses. “If you didn’t grow up with money and you didn’t grow up with society support, that was going to be basically impossible,” Tapia said of opening on their own.
In recent years, coffee companies have been the center of conversation around racial discrimination. There was the arrest of two Black men sitting in a Philadelphia Starbucks in 2018, which touched off debate about racial profiling and lack of diversity in coffee. Locally, Four Barrel Coffee founder Jeremy Tooker left the company after allegations of sexual harassment and toxic workplace culture. Ritual Coffee faced its own internal racial reckoning last year, followed this summer by the firing of the owner’s husband after he used a racial slur at work. Staff at popular San Jose cafe Paper Moon Coffee Co. recently accused the owner of creating a toxic work environment, including criticisms about the owner’s treatment of employees of color and staff who are transgender. Owner Wendy Warren apologized on Instagram, said she started executive coaching and pledged to offer more diversity and inclusion training.
Derisse, who identifies as nonbinary and uses the pronouns they/them, felt their coffee knowledge as a barista was often dismissed in the traditional high-end coffee world. They want Hey Neighbor to be a place where customers feel comfortable asking questions about coffee without feeling self-conscious or judged.
“It always felt quite lofty and inaccessible,” Derisse said of the coffee industry. “It kind of still is.”
The owners of both Fluid and Milk SF opened with the express purpose of providing a welcoming space for the LGBTQ+ community that’s not a bar or nightclub. Fluid will host open mike nights, drag bingo and mentorship opportunities for transgender youth. Calaca Coffee, meanwhile, has invited other local minority-owned businesses, such as jewelry and plant vendors, to pop up there. The owners also hope to grow food in a community garden.
“Anyone can open up a coffee shop nowadays, but it takes something different to be more than just another
business, (to) be a community space,” Ty said. “We really want to be the thing we wanted to see when we were younger.”
Olton Rensch also opened Tallio’s Coffee & Tea in the Bayview to build community through coffee. He didn’t want Bayview residents to have to leave the neighborhood for a cup of specialty coffee, like he long had.
Rensch names each coffee roast after places that he feels have been stereotyped as crime-ridden, lowincome cities, from Bessemer, Ala., to Brownsville in East Brooklyn. He wants to highlight them as being more than that reputation. Tallio’s most popular roast, the Bayview, is “inspired by the vibrant Black community on San Francisco’s southern edge,” a description reads. He also sells a T-shirt emblazoned with images of a cable car and the Bayview Opera House. Next to the cash register is a stack of maps that highlight Bayview businesses.
“We have positive businesses now in the Bayview and other marginalized neighborhoods. That is the perception we’re trying to change,” Rensch said.
But there’s an extra weight that comes with personalizing coffee, Valle said. She feels it when she makes sure to sign off every wholesale email with her “labels”: woman-owned, Latinaowned, locally roasted. The labels, while true to her identities, can start to feel like static definitions beholden to other peoples’ expectations.
“The Latina woman label does not mean that the standard of coffee being roasted and served is only one thing, or that at our coffee shop we cannot make amazing classic lattes, or that our roasted coffee is not of high standard or of quality,” Valle said. Having it adds pressure to both represent Latina women and to prove herself, she added.
“It’s overwhelming,” she said. “I just want to be human for a minute.”
For some of these cafe owners, though, advertising their identity can also feel like a way to honor their predecessors. The owners of both Milk SF and Fluid mention as part of their origin stories Compton’s Cafeteria, an all-night diner and popular gathering place for queer and transgender people in the Tenderloin. In 1966, queer and transgender customers there rioted against police violence — a historic protest now cited along the famous 1969 Stonewall riots in New York City. Fluid’s new home on Hyde Street is just three blocks from where that moment of revolution took place years ago.
“Around 50 years ago, our people were being brutalized and arrested in the same area for being themselves, and now we get to come in and not only own a business that will make sure that everyone is safe there but be focused around our identities,” said Tapia. “I think that’s powerful and very poetic.”