En Español

Jeremy Tooker leans against a round table on which there are 20 identical porcelain mugs, each carefully filled halfway with dry beans.

“This isn’t beginner’s coffee,” Tooker says as he prepares to cup, a daily process of blind tasting to select the beans that will be added to Four Barrel Coffee’s menu.

As he describes the process of testing the fragrance and flavor of both brewed and raw beans, he speaks about their varietal, terroir and astringency — language expected from a wine reviewer, not a coffee-shop owner.

The allusion to wine is no coincidence. When Tooker opened his Valencia Street coffee shop in the midst of the 2008 recession, he had a single, unflinching vision — to have coffee be talked about in the Mission with the same enthusiasm and respect as wine, beer and food.

Fast-forward two years and it’s not uncommon to find a line spilling out the door of the former industrial warehouse. A line that’s there for the coffee, not the free Wi-Fi, which doesn’t exist.

Creating buzz and lines is not new for Tooker. The 31-year-old Portland native has been working in coffee shops for nearly half his life, and helped launch the instantly successful Ritual Roasters in 2005.

Two years later, he and his partner had a falling out. He dismissively characterizes the situation as the two having professional differences, but the differences were so great that he was unwillingly bought out from Ritual.

As Tooker celebrates Four Barrel’s second anniversary today, life hasn’t turned out badly. He is celebrating by giving away free coffee to customers and serving a Tartine cake. There will even be a photo booth on site to commemorate the occasion.

Tooker can often be seen gliding happily through the coffee shop, stopping occasionally to chat with customers. He has a growing business that allows him to pay baristas more than what many waiters make in San Francisco. Most important, he gets to pore over and control every last detail of the coffee experience.

Two customers order as owner Jeremy Tooker chats with a customer in the background.

“We only use whole milk. We don’t sell tea. We don’t have Wi-Fi here,” he says, listing the self-imposed rules.

Excluding Wi-Fi was the big one. When Ritual opened, Tooker and his partners were praised for pioneering connected coffee shops. But after a while, Tooker grew to dislike it. The Internet hurt business as customers camped out at tables for hours, he says, and also kept people from interacting.

Looking out across Four Barrel at 10:30 a.m. on Friday, with the hum of customers’ chatter magnified by the vaulted ceilings, it’s evident that interaction isn’t a problem here. Nor is business.

On a given week, Four Barrel sells 1,000 pounds of coffee in its coffee shop, and nearly 5,000 pounds to wholesale customers. “We are unusually busy,” says Tooker. In comparison, going through 200 to 400 pounds per week is considered high volume for a coffee shop. Ritual, which also sells coffee to restaurants and other cafés in the area, averages roughly 3,000 pounds in wholesale sales.

Josh Margolis, owner of Rosamunde Sausage Grill on Mission Street, one of Four Barrel’s wholesale customers, says that it comes down to taste for him. “Even if I could get coffee for $1 or $2 less a pound, I wouldn’t change. It’s just not worth it.”

Jeremy Tooker, along with his tasting team, just after the morning's cupping.

Tooker has done well enough to start thinking about expanding, but he’s quick to say that it must be done right. “I’m a little obsessive about efficiency and quality. Some places have one or the other, but if you scale your operations right, you can have both.”

Not everyone agrees. One coffee drinker outside of Muddy’s Coffee House on Valencia and 24th streets calls Four Barrel elitist. “They seem stuck up in there, like they are a bunch of hipsters who think they are too good for the rest of us,” says Josh Robinson, a graphic designer who has lived in the neighborhood for seven years.

Tooker is unapologetic.

“I don’t want to appeal to the average coffee drinker,” he says. “The whole point is to not offer everything to everyone.”

At Friday’s daily coffee tasting, that meant just two beans made the cut.

En Español

Tim Ryan carried a squat sandwich board onto the sidewalk on Wednesday, beads of sweat dripping from his face as he crouched down to fix the sign in place at the corner of Mission Street and Sycamore Lane. The board’s block lettering advertised a patio in back.

The record temperatures earlier this week had weary San Franciscans flocking to Mission bars with outdoor patios.

“Monday is one of the slower days,” said Ryan, co-owner of The Sycamore, a gastropub that’s been open for a month. Many new customers find his bar by searching online for outdoor patios in the Mission, he said. Business “went up exponentially this week.”

Once customers arrived, they wanted bottled beers chilled on ice. Demand for those types of drinks was so high that Ryan had to run out at 10 p.m. on Tuesday to get ice from any corner store he could find.

A few blocks away, Zeitgeist had its busiest day of the year on Tuesday, according to bartender Kristina Simons.

“It’s hard to prepare for a night like last [Tuesday], especially when you go from fog to scorching heat practically overnight,” said Simons, recalling that lines to order a drink at the bar were five people deep at 8 p.m.

In anticipation of Wednesday’s rush, most of Zeitgeist’s staff was called in — three bartenders in addition to a half-dozen security guards, line cooks and bar backs.

The Sycamore's special sangria-sicle.

The Sycamore, run almost entirely by Ryan and his sister Liz, relied on more creative means to address the influx, concocting a custom batch of “sangria-sicles” — housemade white sangria frozen to the end of a spoon (cost: $4).

“It was crazy. We [advertised] them online,” Ryan said. “People even began pre-ordering them.”

After serving 400 patrons on Tuesday — nearly double the gastropub’s typical midweek traffic — Ryan says he is anticipating more crowds even as the heat winds down. He spent Wednesday stocking up on bottles of Miller High Life and Corona. And ice. Lots of ice.

En Español

If you drive over the Golden Gate Bridge and take Highway 1 out to Tomales Bay, eventually you will come to the Straus Dairy. And you will come across a not-insignificant number of cows. Hanging out. Eating grass. Doing what cows do, which is to say: not much.

These cows are intimately connected to the unlikeliest food renaissance in recent memory. The Neopolitan pizza renaissance — that made sense. It’s cold here, and pizza makes you warm. The offal renaissance made sense too: Mission residents have been eating brains and necks and tongue for years and not even getting applauded for it. But the idea that there was an ardent ice cream market above and beyond the hardcore crowd that has gathered and shivered outside of Mitchell’s since 1953 — that’s a shock.

So these are the cattle behind the half-hour wait in line at the Bi-Rite Creamery on 18th and Dolores streets, and the cattle responsible for the many flavors of vanilla ice cream at Xanath on Valencia, and the Government Cheese flavor of ice cream at Humphry Slocombe on Harrison off 24th Street. They are the source of the 1,800 gallons of ice cream base that leave Straus every week, most of it bound for the Mission District.

Without Straus, says the Bi-Rite Creamery’s Anne Walker, Bi-Rite would never have gone into the ice cream business. “We’ve never used anything else. There are a lot of products out there, but they don’t have clean ingredients. They aren’t organic, and they aren’t local.”

Straus is ubiquitous in the local ice cream market in part because until recently it was the only organic ice cream base available here. (The San Rafael-based Three Twins began making its own base in March, but as of yet is only selling to two start-up customers, one of which is getting into the packaged ice cream business and the other of which is opening an ice cream shop in San Francisco.)

Ice cream base is not rocket science. It’s basically an anglaise: cream, milk and sugar. But California health code is strict when it comes to dairy and to foods that are adored by small children, and so only high-end restaurants risk making their own. They do this either by proving that they sell less than 2,500 gallons a year or via the more expedient method of stashing their ice cream maker in the back of a cupboard when they see the health inspector coming.

Working from a premade base has its drawbacks, says Walker, who is a pastry chef by training. It’s more difficult to adjust texture. Flavor needs to be infused into the base without using heat as a catalyst, since it’s already been heated once and can’t be again. Straus doesn’t sell an unflavored frozen yogurt base yet, so every yogurt flavor needs to be able to handle a vanilla undertone. But, says Walker, “we’re selling about 360 gallons a week now. We don’t want to be making our own base.”

Meanwhile, Straus has its own reasons for selling to people like Walker. The company has been active in efforts to re-create the local food system that once existed around the Bay Area. It was the first local dairy to switch back to organic production. It was critical to the development of the Marin Agricultural Land Trust, which has helped keep land near San Francisco in agricultural production instead of being turned into housing developments or parkland. And so, when Straus began to produce more milk than it could sell, the company looked for a way to create more products to sell locally, instead of expanding its range.

The organic dairy market has gone through boom and bust cycles in the last decade, and Straus was looking for a way to sidestep that. It was already making and selling its own ice cream, so it began selling the base as well. From an inventory standpoint it made sense: Fresh milk goes bad quickly. Fresh yogurt goes bad after about 60 days. Ice cream base, once it’s frozen, keeps for up to six months. Ice cream base is a way, in essence, to bank dairy.

The Bi-Rite and Bi-Rite Creamery are more intertwined than they might initially seem: Cases of fruit that fail to sell quickly enough cross the street and become ice cream, for example. Walker, who is married to Bi-Rite’s owner, Sam Mogannam, had been baking pastries for Bi-Rite for years in rented kitchen space at D’Alessio, on Market Street. She was looking for a kitchen closer to Bi-Rite itself, and the space, when she found it, had a storefront attached.

The first thought was to sell pastries and baked goods out of the storefront, but, as Walker says, “Tartine is right around the corner.” And so the decision was made: ice cream. “We had no idea it was going to be like this,” she says. “This is a cold town. We didn’t think there was this much of a market.”

They were proved wrong — which was as much of a surprise to Straus as to the Bi-Rite owners. Things haven’t exactly gone according to plan. “We’re selling [ice cream base] so fast that we’re beginning to think that maybe we shouldn’t even bother freezing it,” says Rich Martin, who runs sales for Straus. The company just put in a private ice cream bar at its headquarters and is preparing to introduce a few new flavors to its own ice cream line.

“Once in a while life just gives you a win-win situation,” Martin says, his voice full of the contentment of a man who is moving a lot of product in the middle of a dismal recession. “This is one of them. We’re going to enjoy it.”

Thousands flocked to La Cocina’s 2010 SF Street Food Fest Saturday and snacked on everything from piroshkis to alfajores to burgers. Mission Loc@l was there and brought back this audio slideshow.

En Español

Download a PDF of the map here.

When I left the Mission for UC Berkeley in 2004, I couldn’t imagine the neighborhood I would come back to.

When I was a kid, groups of young men wearing khaki pants with red bandannas sticking out of their back pockets stood watch all along 24th Street. The beauty of the neighborhood lived in the colorful walls, the tantalizing smells of meat and fresh bread from the taquerias and bakeries, and the chatter of Spanish that wafted through the streets.

When I came back after years at work and school, the gangs seemed to have dropped out of view, replaced by something foreign — it was a new Mission and a new 24th Street, where a coffee shop scene had taken root.

Where did I fit in? As a Mission native, Latina and cyclist, where should I go? My first stop was a place I remembered from childhood — Café La Bohème.

Open since 1975, Café La Bohème’s mismatched wood tables and chairs fill with longtime regulars and a mixed crowd of U.S. and foreign-born customers. When I was a kid, elderly gentlemen pulled the café’s chairs out onto the sidewalk most days and sat chatting in Spanish.

“We’re not planning to upgrade; we’re intentionally keeping the old style,” said Awad Faddoul,  who bought the place in 1995 and says he’s happy to be a part of its history.

A few blocks away, I visit Haus, which used to be a tattoo parlor and fortune-telling shop. Today it’s a light-filled, clutter-free coffee shop, full of people mostly under 30, mostly plugged into their MacBooks.

But Haus’s owner, Ron Mullick, doesn’t see it as gentrification. The cafe’s open to everyone, he said. “Why is it expected that the Mission would have crappy places?”

Still, customer Katie Koerber said the place has a “hipster-y” feel that’s reflected along the street. “I recognize the flavor of the neighborhood has changed and it makes me sad. When I first moved here, I liked the [Latino] enclave, and I have some guilty feelings because I’m part [of the changes].”

Ross Lesslie, who works at the coffee shop, says, “People come in here to work and use this as their office space.” Owner Mullick has noticed the trend and plans to hold events and art showings to encourage mingling. “You see people on Facebook making friends instead of making them at the café.”

Café La Bohème’s Faddoul also notices the impact computers have had on community in general. “You’re losing the feel and touch of people; the computer is taking over.” Faddoul has found it a bit more difficult to get people involved in the poetry scene.

His latest success in bringing people together, he said, was the World Cup viewing parties.

As my search continued, I walked farther east on 24th Street to L’s Caffé, open since 2005. Whether holding public meetings by the mayor’s office or Supervisor David Campos’ office, or participating in the Mission Arts and Performance Project community art events, the owners of L’s Caffe have immersed themselves in the neighborhood.

Owned by three sisters, Gabriela, Lourdes and Rosy Lozano, L’s Caffé’s inception is rooted in family.

When the sisters discovered that their parents had reached retirement age without a source of income, they quit their professions and opened the café. Gabriela, a nurse and attorney, Lourdes, an accountant, and Rosy, an artist, began the work of opening a small business.

Their plan was to establish the café in five years and use its revenue to provide their parents’ livelihood while they returned to their professions. The business is now in its fifth year, but Gabriela Lozano says the economy has forced them to stay a bit longer than originally planned.

Within its red and yellow walls a diverse crowd — in both age and ethnicity — sits at L’s tables. “It’s amazing how people opened their arms to us despite not being from the neighborhood,” said Gabriela Lozano, originally from Mexico.

“I feel like this shop is Latino-friendly, has good food and free Internet,” said Guillermo Cole, a customer of L’s for about a year. A native of Los Angeles, Cole said San Francisco offers a different Latino scene. “In Los Angeles, the Latino communities are just black and brown, and in San Francisco, the deep Hispanic community is mixed with white people.”

Adan Cabrera said he likes L’s because he can concentrate. “I feel like the hipsters haven’t infested it.”

As I walked more around the neighborhood, running into new coffee shops on what felt like every corner, I realized that not only the neighborhood had changed — so had I.

Places like Haus and Coffee Bar seem to draw me in, but I think I’d grab my laptop before entering. And when I want to feel at home, I’ll have my mocha where I can watch seniors have tea and kids wiggle in their seats. For me, that place is L’s. It reminds that the old Mission still lives.

En Español

Missions Kitchen has exactly the kind of clean-looking dining room in which a guest might expect to see a health inspection report posted in clear sight, but none was visible on a recent visit, and a request to see the report triggered a mad rush to the back room.

Matthew Purdy, the manager, emerged with the green scorecard and the health inspection report. The score: 76. Like many poorly performing restaurants, its scores are typically below 90: 88 in 2008, 78 in 2007, and one 90 at the end of 2007.

“We try to work with the restaurants,” said Richard Lee, director of the environmental health division of San Francisco’s Department of Public Health. “But sometimes the operators don’t cooperate and feel it is not a priority.”

Researchers, health inspectors and other officials agreed there is little incentive for San Francisco restaurants with consistently poor scores to improve them. “When they know the poor performance is public, they make food safety a real priority,” said Sarah Klein, a lawyer and one of the authors of the 2008 study “Dirty Dining,” by the Center for Science in the Public Interest, based in Washington, D.C.

In San Francisco there’s no threat of disclosure; scores don’t have to be posted. Purdy at Missions Kitchen willingly showed a reporter his last inspection report, tacked to a back bulletin board. It was soiled and difficult to read, but Purdy knew exactly what the problem had been. The refrigerators under the cooking area were broken and the owner, he said, was unwilling to repair them for $2,000. “Write about it,” Purdy said.

The refrigeration system under the grill has yet to be fixed, the manager said.

That’s unnecessary in other cities, where diners know the risks of eating in a restaurant with low scores and owners know the downside of getting them, studies show.

Other Cities Use Clearly Displayed Letter Grades, San Francisco Uses the Threat of More Visits

Klein cited the experience of Los Angeles and its success in reducing the number of foodborne illnesses by 20 percent. Since Los Angeles passed its ordinance in 1997 requiring restaurants to post letter-grade scorecards within five feet of the front door, nearly 75 surrounding cities have followed suit, according to the county.

Last month, New York also began requiring restaurants to post letter health grades for diners to see, following a report that 10,000 people a year end up in the emergency room from foodborne illnesses.

In San Francisco, the health department’s main prod to improve scores is the threat of more routine visits. But it’s a dull stick: The department rarely makes the required number of routine checks on Mission District restaurants, records show.
Click here for a PDF of the full chart by Justin Vaughn Halliwill.

By Justin Vaughn Halliwill. Click here for a PDF of the full chart.

As it turns out, there is currently no health inspector for part of the Mission, but even when there are no vacancies, the department hardly follows its own protocol of two routine visits a year for restaurants that score 81 percent or above, and three a year for those with scores of 80 percent or below.

Lee blamed the lack of visits on the shortage of inspectors. “Districts have been vacant [an inspector] and most likely haven’t been inspected. It affects the public. It’s unfortunate, but that’s what happens when things get delayed.”

“It takes a long time, it’s how the city is,” Lee said, referring to the process of hiring inspectors. Hiring approval has to go through several departments — a process that usually takes four to six months and sometimes longer, he said.

Lee declined to say how long the Mission District position has been vacant, but it’s not the only neighborhood short of health inspectors, he said.

At present, Lee said, the health department is operating with 18 restaurant inspectors; 24 or 25 are needed to cover the city’s 3,944 restaurants and fast-food franchises. Inspectors also check 2,556 markets, schools and hospitals that handle food. Lee declined to name the other districts that are short inspectors, but said that those with adequate staffing help where there are vacancies.

The delays mean that inspections slip — oddly, often for those restaurants that most need it.

Take Dak Win at 2845 Mission Street: It scored an 80 last December with two high-risk violations, one for vermin and one for unclean surfaces. Inspectors returned for a reinspection seven days later, according to records available online. Seven months later, they have yet to make another routine inspection.

In October 2008, the restaurant scored 52 points, and the inspector returned three times for scheduled reinspections to verify that the violations had been abated.

In July 2007, Dak Win scored 57 and finished the year without further routine inspections, records show.

Elsy’s Restaurant at 2893 Mission Street scored 59 in July 2010. It had been more than a year since its last routine inspection, in May 2009, when it scored 78. It scored 72 in May 2008.

One reinspection was scheduled at Elsy’s in 2009, and two in 2008. But in the three years that Elsy’s received scores below 80 in routine, unscheduled inspections, it should have had two more routine inspections; those never happened.

Lee said that despite its staffing shortage, the department’s goal is to inspect businesses twice a year. These days the department counts a reinspection as a second visit. Such follow-up inspections allow inspectors to observe new violations, he said.

Reinspections are not the thorough routine inspections required by the protocol, however. They typically take place a few days after a routine inspection, and the staff knows the inspector will be returning to check on earlier violations.

The Poor Scores Include High-Risk Violations

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s top five “critical violations” are improper holding temperatures, poor personal hygiene by employees, food from unsafe sources, improper cooking time and insufficiently sanitized food surfaces, according to Klein’s study.

On Mission Street, all of the 14 restaurants with scores below 90 violated one or more of these measures. In addition, some had rodent infestations, which are deemed high-risk by the city but not by the Centers.

The Argument Against Clearly Posted Scores

When Supervisor Chris Daly tried in 2004 to get the Board of Supervisors to adopt a letter-grade system with more stringent posting requirements, the restaurant industry argued that it would unfairly damn restaurants — that routine inspections offer only a snapshot in time.

Kevin Westlye, executive director of the Golden Gate Restaurant Association, defended the association’s position against a more strict and transparent rating system. He has seen restaurants that consistently score well suddenly receive low marks when they are busy, he said.

He argued that the San Francisco law is transparent, because it requires the inspection letter to be posted, and that those who do well should not be subject to multiple inspections.

“The Department’s policy is to post the inspection report so that the public does not have to ask to see the report,” according to the health department’s website. But the reports are often hard to see or not posted at all. Only the most recent reports are posted on the department’s website; for older ones, a user must go to EveryBlock.

This contrasts sharply with New York’s website, where a user can enter a zip code, get a list of restaurants and their scores, then check the history of each restaurant. Los Angeles too offers an easy-to-use system with businesses’s histories and lists of problem restaurants.

“There are a lot of responsible restaurants,” Westlye said. “The people who are trying very hard and score well don’t need to be inspected. You can take the same resources to go to the repeat offenders.”

The health department currently doesn’t have those resources, however. And the so-called snapshots prove remarkably consistent.

Take Mission Street between 15th and 26th streets: The majority of the 61 restaurants in those blocks score above 90, and 26 have earned a symbol of excellence for doing so three years in a row.

At the same time, many of the 14 restaurants that score below 90 are consistently B to C-minus performers. Two exceptions are La Corneta Taqueria, which fell dramatically to 55 in 2007 but then recouped and scored 88 in its second routine inspection that year; and Acaxutla Taqueria, which has scored above 90 all but three times since 2005. Moreover, Acaxutla, which underwent multiple routine inspections over several years, scored fairly consistently on each during a single year, records show.

Klein’s report strongly recommends using a letter grade that consumers can understand, and posting it where it can easily be seen by diners. “For a restaurant association to say that consumers don’t have a right to see [the score] because they only happen every so often is just silly,“ Klein said. Inspections “are meant to protect the public health and are paid for by public dollars. Consumers have every right to know.”

Terrance Powell, the chief environmental health specialist for LA’s Department of Public Health, had his own idea about why San Francisco has lagged behind in transparency around inspections: “It’s a reflection of the population. If people wanted disclosure they would get it.”

Click here for a PDF of the full chart.

En Español

A reader said that when she went into McDonald’s at 24th and Mission streets on Friday afternoon to get a frappé, a commotion broke out. She looked, and saw a mouse sitting on the monitor near the counter. The manager pursued it with a plastic bag, but the mouse ran — right across the french fries.

Diners wondered why the manager didn’t use a cup to catch the mouse. ”I was wondering why they didn’t ask for their money back,” the reader said. No one did. Before walking out, the reader said she saw the manager in the back of the kitchen, still pursuing the mouse.

Javier Montesinos, the manager, said Saturday that he thought the mouse came in from the outside. “I’ve been here many years and it’s the first time,” he’s had a problem with a rodent, he said. He called the pest control company to get rid of it and his staff cleaned up everything before serving more food.

When asked how he knew it had come in from the outside, he said that one of the diners saw it first in the lobby.

McDonald’s was last inspected on April 24, 2009, and received a score of 96 out of 100, according to the Environmental Health Department’s website. It is more than three months late in getting an annual inspection.

The 24th and Mission Street McDonald’s earned a Symbol of Excellence in 2009 for receiving scores above 90 for three years in a row. Previously, its generally excellent scores fell to 76 in April, 2007, and 86 in October, 2007, according to the history of its inspections on SFEveryblock.

“Join Kaytea Petro, one of the founders of Neighborhood Fruit, as she’ll lead a group of gleaners to harvest whatever’s freshest at the time. Afterwards, the surplus fruit will be donated to the Free Farmstand. Bring your bike and get ready to view your neighborhood in a new way.”

Kristin Smith reviews local movie theater concession stands at The Bold Italic.

The highlight: The Junior Mints are, according to the attendant who talked to Smith, the only ice-cold thing at the Roxie. Other than “his heart.”