Out of the dozens of people who have gathered outside of 1100 Valencia St. at 9 a.m. on a beautiful Friday morning, some have come for the chance (small, but real) of drinking coffee in the presence of six-time NBA all-star Jimmy Butler (now, as of this February, also a Golden State Warrior).
Butler is the founder of BIGFACE coffee, which has opened a two-week-long pop-up coffee shop in the former storefront of Lucca Ravioli, currently leased to local payment-processing behemoth Square.
Others are here in search of coffee-related diversion. “I care nothing for the Warriors,” says Rocio Castanon. Castanon, a schoolteacher from East Oakland, roams the Bay in search of new coffee drinks. (Among her recommendations: The dragon heart mocha at Café con Cariño and the lavender latte at Ain’t Normal.)
Brandon Stinespring, who has come to this line from the far-flung shores of Sausalito, is here for coffee and Butler. “He’s such an intelligent basketball player,” Stinespring says. “The way that he plays fits well with the Warriors’ style of unselfish playing.”
Before opening BIGFACE coffee in 2021, Jimmy Butler achieved pandemic-era notoriety as one of the players living in the NBA bubble, a quarantine zone created inside Walt Disney World to keep the basketball coming even when nothing else was.
Coffee options within the bubble were dismal, and Butler capitalized on this emerging market by making French press coffee in his hotel room and selling cups to other basketball players for $20 apiece. Anyone who was out of twenties, Butler said, could also buy a cup with a hundred-dollar bill, aka a “bigface.”
“He’s a complicated human being,” says Stinespring, about this blatant price-gouging. “I think he plays the asshole.”
“Hey,” Stinespring says, to the guy standing in line behind him. “Don’t I know you?”
“I was just thinking, ‘Hey, I know that cat,’” says Mitchell Celicious, an award-winning barista who recently returned from the 2025 Coffee Masters competition in London. With Celicious is Alex Pong, co-founder of Paper Son Coffee.
Celicious and Stinespring begin to reminisce about the early days of The Coffee Movement, where Celicious used to work. Pre-Sausalito, Stinespring lived a block away from the shop’s Chinatown location.
“You were there at such a sweet time,” says Celicious.
“It was the ‘Cheers’ time,” says Stinespring. “I still have friends that I talk to every day that I met there.”
“A golden window,” says Celicious. Between when The Coffee Movement opened in 2019, and when it began to get exponentially busy in 2021, he says, a bond formed between regular customers and the four-person crew.
Stinespring’s coffee knowledge leveled up considerably during that window. “That was the time that you could sit there and talk for an hour and people would be like, “Try this! Try that!”
Celicious is here because Mission Local’s founder and executive editor, Lydia Chávez, has asked him to help us — and our readers — understand where BIGFACE fits in the pantheon of coffee. Is it halfway decent? Is it good? Is it stratospherically, intergalactically good? She wanted to know, and was willing to front the cost of the experiment.
As someone who is both empirically good at coffee and married to Mission Local’s director of development, Vicky Añibarro, Celicious is the closest thing this publication has to an in-house coffee expert.
It is hard for your reporter to make a fair, impartial assessment of anything between these walls, because the last time they stood in a line like this, it was in April of 2019, a few days before Lucca Ravioli closed after 94 years in business.
When your reporter finally reached the head of the line that day, they were so overcome with emotion to have arrived at the end of so many affordable deli case items recommended and purchased that they were unable to make an order.
The kindly, clearly exhausted co-owner of Lucca, Michael Feno, proceeded to assemble the best charcuterie assortment your reporter has ever had — one which they kept like a little paper-wrapped altar inside their refrigerator and hesitated to finish, although ultimately they did, because obviously it was going to go bad.
When feelings this heavy are involved, an impartial outsider is needed. Especially once the line starts moving, we enter a space that looks like the modular alien lovechild of BIGFACE’s brushed-metal-spaceship aesthetic and the old Italian deli. Did Lucca even play music? There is a sound system now, and it’s pumping out club hits of the late ‘90s.
Greeting everyone at the door is Britt Berg, chief operating officer of BIGFACE. Berg, a small, elegant woman dressed in BIGFACE apparel (14 oz denim trucker jacket and denim pants with all-over laser applique) also knows Celicious; the two worked at Intelligentisia coffee in Chicago, at the same time, when Celicious was a barista and Berg was director of branding.
“No, I have never worked for a celebrity before,” says Berg, before I can even ask. “But I have worked for perfectionists. Jimmy and I are both Virgos, if that means anything.”
Gone are the high, narrow aisles crammed with wine, anchovies, tapenade, pannetone, every kind of pasta. In its place are neat grids of merch fusing the BIGFACE brand and an Italian deli aesthetic. There is BIGFACE x Carbone pizza sauce, BIGFACE x Graza olive oil, BIGFACE x Filthy Amarena Cocktail Cherries.
One sweatshirt for sale reads “Faccia Grande” (“BIGFACE” in Italian). Another t-shirt reads “Better to have Lucca’d and lost than never to have Lucca’d at all.”
At the counter, we are informed that the most high-profile coffee offering, the $100 coffee-tasting flight, can be assembled à la carte for under $30.
Our group orders an espresso ($4) , a pour-over ($10) a cappuccino ($7), a latte ($9), and one each of the specialty drinks (Coconut Cloud Latte, Tonic 002, Cherry Cream Soda — all $10).
(The shop is called BIGFACE, so clearly something on the menu had to be $100, whether or not anyone actually bought it, and Celicious points out that, because we opted out of the flight, we don’t really know what would have come on that tray.)
The prices, while on the high end, aren’t much different than any specialty coffee house in San Francisco. There’s only one type of coffee being used for the duration of the pop-up, grown by Dukunde Kawa Musasa Cooperative in Rwanda, and sourced and roasted by Onyx Coffee Lab in Arkansas.
Celicious raises the espresso, takes a sip. It’s hard to hear anything over the thumping beat of “Better Off Alone” by Alice Deejay, so everyone leans in. “Bright,” he says thoughtfully. “Floral. Sweet. It does linger a little. Not-so-pleasant aftertaste. Astringent. I would have ground it a little finer.”
He passes the cup. I take a sip. It tastes like being punched in the face.
“That’s the acidity,” Celicious explains. “Within the industry, there’s this trend to have more punchy, higher intensity acidity, but I don’t know that I really like that. It’s more appealing to coffee people than to the general public.” (Kelly McNamee, the beverage consultant who designed the pop-up’s mixed drinks, confirms that this in-your-face-ness is part of the plan. “We went through tests of 10 different coffees and this was just more experimental and tempermental than the others.”)
Celicious tries the cappuccino next. He and Pong have already confirmed with the barista that the milk is acceptable. (Califa for the oat milk, Organic Valley for regular. Alexandre or Straus extra cream would be even better, Pong and Celicious say, but those are so expensive that not many shops use them.)
“The milk is great,” Celicious says, of the cappuccino. “Properly done. But it’s hard to marry milk with that acidity.” He sits back. “I think it’s very good. This meets specialty standards in San Francisco.” That said, he adds, nothing here has really inspired him. He declines to try the latte.
“I’d drink this,” says Pong, who ordered the pour-over. He hands it to Celicious, who takes a sip and stares into the middle distance. “Chocolatey,” he says. “Pretty viscous. Nice body to it. There is some complexity — cherry-like.” The verdict: Good, but not $10 worth of good.
“How is yours?” says Celicious to Stinespring, who has settled in at the next table with an iced coffee ($8). Stinespring hands it over. This turns out to be Celicious’ favorite.
“Juxtaposed to the espresso, the acidity is more tame,” Celicoius says. “When you drink this, it’s not hitting you with, like, acid juice. It’s more palatable.”
The iced coffee is also, he points out, brewed by a different person than the barista who pulled the espresso shots. “This is a very satisfying brew,” Celicious continues. “But I have yet to be wowed.”
To be fair, the coffee shops that have recently wowed Celicious aren’t even in San Francisco. His current leaderboard includes Special Guests in London and BlendIn in Houston. In the city, he recommends Paper Son, Golden Goat, and a pop-up called Komakase.
Celicious consistently emphasizes that “good” is a subjective experience. If you like that coffee, that coffee is good. With that in mind, he says, the coffee itself at BIGFACE is good from a quality and ethics standpoint. “I love Onyx. They’re working with good coffee.”
To the untrained palate, the specialty drinks — particularly the Cherry Cream Soda, which combines espresso, tonic, cherry syrup, and salted maple cloud foam — are also quite good. Celicious is uninterested.
“This is easy to manipulate. You can add bad coffee in there, add some sugar and whatever ingredients and it’s fine.” He takes a sip anyway, then pauses. “This is actually great with the espresso,” he says — the acid from the cherries and the acidity of the espresso are working well together.
For Pong, it is the Coconut Cloud Latte. “I could see myself carrying this around on a hot day,” he says.
San Francisco is a tough place to make good coffee long-term, both say. Overhead is high. In other countries, Celicious adds, it’s possible to lavish eight minutes on making a drink.
Here, he says, “You have to do a drink per minute or faster, because it’s volume that’s gonna get you revenue. Or you have a crazy model where it’s $200 for two items and it’s slow. Those are the two models that a cafe can run right now.”
So, big question: Are any of these coffee drinks worth the money?
“No,” says Celicious. “Yes. No.” He turns to Pong. “What’s your first thought? Mine left my mouth.”
“I would recommend just picking two of your favorite specialty beverages and rolling with that,” says Pong. “Maybe an espresso.”
It’s time to go. Every drink has been drunk except for the latte. It occurs to me that part of what cuts so deep about losing Lucca was the luxury of time that it represented — those few minutes that the people who worked there had to lavish on a problem, even if that problem was only having $10 to buy some cheese to take to a picnic.
San Francisco is a city of autodidacts, excited to broadcast and take in new information and experiences. But the microclimates that let that flourish are harder to find. Until we get that time back, places like Lucca can only close; we won’t be getting any new ones.
But for now, there’s a line out the door at 22nd and Valencia for the first time in six years. The tables are full of people chattering and laughing and trying each others’ drinks. The crowd here is far more diverse than what I’ve seen outside of similarly pricey coffee shops.
Maybe a few of them are even neighbors, getting to know each other. It’s good to see the kind of habitat where that might thrive, even if it’s for only two weeks.
The BIGFACE coffee pop-up runs through July 27 from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.
The line is influencers and other people with “trending” life ambitions.
i like drinking coffee.
i def do not enjoy those who talk about coffee.
this article reads like it’s about YOU & THEM(S) & not about the coffee.
Agree, would have been great to hear more about the beans, the equipment being used, the staff (something other than what they are wearing)… explanation of the $100 flight gimmick was illuminating though.
“It’s like being punched in the face”. 😂😂😂
My husband loves strong coffee AND the Warriors. I’ll have to bring him here.
This article was a huge delight to read! I’m so grateful for all of Mission Local’s coverage, but the playfulness of this article made me smile.