The 13 best coffee spots in San Francisco

Founded in 2014 by Michael McCrory and Lauren Crabbe, this indie roaster brought high-end beans to the Outer Sunset. The original, 600-square-foot location opened on a caffeine-starved strip of Lawton Street—thus, the perpetual line snaking out the door. A second cafe arrived on Taraval in 2017, in addition to a roasting facility next door. Today there are three locations in the Outer Sunset and one downtown. Whichever one you visit, order a Snowy Plover, the Andytown signature beverage that’s similar to an espresso cream soda, topped with housemade whipped cream.

Brooke McDonnell and Helen Russell started roasting beans out of a Marin County garage in 1995; today their business has grown to encompass subscription customers and cafes all around the Bay Area. In San Francisco, you can visit Equator—named for the region where coffee is grown—at Fort Mason, on 2nd Street in SoMa, and in the Round House at the Golden Gate Bridge: a spectacular round interior with a modular ceiling and incredible views of the bridge to accompany that special cup of coffee. Don’t miss the French Laundry Blend, created with chef Thomas Keller for his flagship restaurant, or the Per Se blend, also developed with Keller and served at his restaurant in New York.

This Potrero Hill standby opened in 1989, when founder Roger Hillyard broke his French press and decided to open up a coffeehouse instead. His son Chris and wife Amy now run the business and have expanded into Oakland and into both the SFO and OAK airports. This coffeehouse brings community together with an annual Halloween pet parade, St. Patrick’s Day bagpipes and other festive happenings—and fed over 50,000 meals to people in Oakland and San Francisco during the pandemic. Farley’s commissions art from locals for the walls and roasts its own coffee—need we say more?

If you’re a coffee drinker, and if you’re friends with coffee drinkers, you’ve probably at least thought about what it might be like to open a coffee shop. And that’s exactly how Rise & Grind came to be: It was an idea that three friends shared over drinks. Now, the friends (a.k.a. the founders) have two locations—one in the Mission and one in the Richmond District. Don’t miss the cookie butter latté, sweetened with Biscoff cookie butter, or the iced Richmond/Mission Chill, their version of a Vietnamese coffee.

With the fun tagline, “Roasting in the Haight with love,” this spacious cafe with small batched roasted coffee is right across from Golden Gate Park in the Haight-Ashbury district. Owner Aquiles Guerrero has coffee in his blood: He was born on a coffee farm in Nicaragua and grew up picking coffee, becoming a barista at age 12 and a roaster at 18. But his roots are local, too: He attended Capuchino High School in San Bruno, and his family owned local San Francisco coffee shop chain Martha & Bros. Coffee. Flywheel is also family owned and operated, and the cafe—which makes for a great meeting spot—was hand-built using mostly reclaimed wood and repurposed materials.

Sightglass has three San Francisco locations: in the Mission, at Divisadero and in SoMa, where its impressive flagship on 7th Street doubles as the production roastery and company headquarters. There, knowledgeable baristas host educational labs and Friday night tastings. The company’s USDA-certified organic coffee is sourced from sustainable farming producers worldwide. Owned by two brothers, the enterprise began with a “small, rickety service cart” in 2009 serving coffee out of a warehouse with a roll-up door. The name Sightglass comes from the viewing window on their vintage PROBAT coffee roaster.

At Ritual, the baristas approach coffee as a sommelier does wine, sourcing “sweet, clean, single-origin coffees” and a seasonal espresso blend—as of publication, for example, it’s the Headliner Seasonal Espresso with notes of apricot jam, milk chocolate and yuzu. Founder Eileen Rinaldi founded Ritual in 2005 after tasting a life-changing shot of espresso in Seattle. Last year, Ritual rolled out a line of canned cold coffees, and while its Howard Street roastery is not currently open to the public, you can sit down and taste at its four San Francisco cafés and one in Napa.

First-generation Ethiopian owner Kinani Ahmed created this independent café and roastery in 2014 and today works with farmers in Ethiopia, Kenya, Colombia and elsewhere to source his beans. One coffeehouse location is at Folsom and 10th while the other is on Valencia at 16th. The spot’s name references the sextant, a ship’s navigational tool, and Sextant’s website explains that for Ahmed, it’s a symbol of how coffee was first transported out of Africa. Try the Wired Gandhi, a spicy house specialty made from espresso and chai, and go home with a bag of Maiden Voyage whole beans, a 100 percent Ethiopian blend.

Ritual alum Kevin Bohlin founded this cafe in 2013. While regulars line up for pour over, cold brew and espresso drinks, serious coffee buffs find the real draw is Bohlin’s obsessive attention to his beans’ farming, roasting and sourcing. He can rattle off the names of the producers he works with in Guatemala, Kenya and Honduras—the Zelaya family in Antigua, for example, or the Paz family in Peña Blanca—and describe the specific agricultural climate that lends each batch of beans its unique flavor. There are now two locations in San Francisco and two in Menlo Park. The cafe is named both for San Francisco, the city, and for Saint Francis and his values. As the website reads, “Kevin discovered that small scale everyday farmers produced some of the most complex and incredible coffees in the world, yet they had no experience of what was happening to their work thousands of miles away or its tremendous value and appreciation by specialty coffee drinkers.”

You have to visit the Mission District’s tiny Linea Caffe (which just reopened in 2023 after its pandemic closure), established by Andrew Barnett in 2013, and its secondary roastery/cafe in Potrero Hill. Here, you’ll sample the delicious 100 percent organic coffees sourced from environmentally friendly producers and importers. Or order for homebrewing: Linea roasts on Tuesdays and Thursdays and ships within 24 hours. The Organic Big Calm Decaf puts truth to the idea that decaf drinkers are the most dedicated since they’re looking for taste alone and not the caffeine; this whole bean coffee has notes of toffee, sugarcane, stonefruit and cocoa.

In Four Barrel Coffee’s comfortable, exposed-beams coffeehouse in the Mission, you’ll sip on brews roasted on a “hulking beast of a vintage German roaster” that supposedly allows for consistent heat and ample airflow. You can come for free public coffee tastings on Saturdays or take one of the ongoing classes in espresso and milk preparation. Four Barrel is also part of the Mill, a coffee shop on Divisadero with a menu of toast (with nice things on it), bread and coffee, curated in tandem with Josey Baker Bread. You’ve really got to pay attention to your brew there, though: There’s no Wi-Fi and no outlets. Focus inward.

The first Philz Coffee was, of course, the creation of a Phil: Palestinian-born Phil Jaber and his son Jacob, who got the ball rolling in 2003. Phil had operated a corner grocery in the Mission for more than 25 years and decided to try his hand at coffee. While the original Mission location at 24th and Folsom closed in 2023, the brand has expanded to 14 San Francisco locations, as well as in the surrounding Bay Area, SoCal, the Sacramento region and even Chicago. Philz specializes in customized coffee blends and sustainably sources its beans from around the world, roasting them across the bay in Oakland. The most ordered drink here? The iced mint mojito coffee.

The brainchild of freelance musician and coffee obsessive James Freeman, Blue Bottle began in Oakland in the early 2000s. The first San Francisco brick-and-mortar location was the Hayes Valley Kiosk on Linden Street, which remains in the company’s arsenal, along with a dozen others in the city. Today, the iconic blue logo is symbolic of a coffee empire, with outposts in New York, L.A., Boston, Miami, Washington, D.C. and internationally. The coffee is often sourced from producers Blue Bottle has used for five or more years, most of it certified organic.