CoffeeBeer >> Double Shot Buzz >> 4 Misc California Cafes
This month’s column features the final four cafes from my California trip earlier this year. After our day spent in Sacramento with my uncle, my Bay Area friend Mistah Rick and I drove down to Berkeley to meet up with some people for lunch. Before meeting up at Tacubaya Mexican Restaurant, Rick and I stopped into the East Bay Vivarium to visit the monitors and lizards. After we had a great lunch and caught up with my cousins Mark and Meiling and my old friend Alan, Rick and I decided that before we explore some Berkeley breweries, we would start off with a coffee.
So we stopped at Artís Coffee Roasters, where we both chose a really nice coffee roast for our two cortados. We took our drinks outside onto the patio where we sat, sipped, and listened to the cacophony of the nearby trains passing, traffic, alarms, bells, dinging sounds, and the wind. Our drinks were quite good and were perfect accompaniments to the city’s natural symphony.
Besides fine coffee, Artís also offers a range of pastries, and probably the reason that the coffee is so good is because it’s actually live-roasted to order. I think that’s a really nice touch. They also deliver their cortados, cappuccinos, espressos, and everything else on Uber Eats.
A few days earlier, before we took off from Bakersfield to drive up to Auburn, Rick and I decided to stop somewhere for a coffee and a pastry of some kind. Checking online I could find only one place in Bakersfield that mentioned a savoury pastry among all the sugary options, and that was Cloud 9 Coffee. We followed the directions to the place on GoogleMaps and were a bit confused when we pulled into a large car park flanking a Wells Fargo Bank tower block. At first we suspected we might find one of those tiny coffee counters flanked by two corporate offices on Floor 5 or something. But fortunately Cloud 9 is a separate cafe attached to the side of the building, with its own outside entrance. So we went ahead and parked and went inside.
At the counter we ordered cappuccinos and the only non-sweet item in the display case, the “savory scone”. We seated ourselves at the side window counter, where we had a lovely view of a working oil derrick that was surrounded by greenery.
Our drinks were served in glasses on black saucers with gold spoons. My dry cappuccino tasted pretty much the same as Rick’s normal cappuccino, but the top of mine was missing the pretty rosette in the shape of a plant that capped Rick’s. Both cappuccinos were overly mild and a bit weak. Oh well, we thought, ordering coffee at an unknown venue is always a gamble.
But the disappointments continued. Our “savory scones”, which we expected to have at least cheese and herbs, and perhaps some sort of vegetable, were generously dotted with bits of something brown and chewy…er, was that meat? Ah yes, I had forgotten: we were in Bakersfield, so it must have been...bacon! As a hungry pescatarian who simply doesn’t like meat and hasn’t eaten any for over fifty years, I decided I’d just try to eat whatever bread was around the bacon.
Unfortunately the bits of bacon were diced small and plentiful, and the bread was well soaked with intense bacon-ness. I soon realised that on the scale of “Yum!” and “Yuck!”, with “Meh...” in the middle, this was definitely right at the “Yuck!” end. The honest review from omnivore Rick was “Not something I would have ordered...” Honestly, we both wondered why they didn’t just call it a “bacon scone”.
I mean, to both of us, the word savory, however you want to spell it, simply means that it isn’t sweet. So why not just say it’s a bacon scone, at least for the benefit of pescetarians, vegetarians, Jews, Muslims, and anyone else who might be offended? I thought this was false advertising.
Needless to say, aside from the great view of the nodding donkey, I saw nothing likeable about this place, and I looked forward to us moving up the road and into Northern California, hopefully stopping soon for a lunch I could actually eat. Any coffee cafe in the days ahead of us would be a vast improvement.
In all fairness, though, when my email receipt from Cloud 9 asked me to review the place, I did. And I ended up receiving a reply back from the cafe saying they were very sorry I was unhappy with our visit, and that they would change their labelling of the scone to say it had bacon. And they refunded our money, so that was a really nice customer-friendly gesture. Still, it would be a bit more appealing to not only label the bacon scone properly, but also perhaps offer some sort of savoury scone for those customers who don’t eat meat.
As to the coffee, it may have just been a bad day. And apparently their lavender lattes are quite popular.
On the final Saturday of my trip, Rick and I took Caltrain into San Francisco for the day. As we were staying at Vicky’s house in Menlo Park, we walked the 8/10 of a mile to the Menlo Park station. The train, which would take 45 minutes to get into San Francisco, wasn’t due to arrive for some time. So we decided to stop at the nearby Saint Frank to get a coffee to take on board.
I was amused by the simple name, especially as it seemed to perfectly match what is basically a simple coffee stand. It was mid-morning and there was a long queue waiting at the window. Standing in front of us was a group of people with rather strange accents, almost a combination of Kiwi and German, who all seemed to be together. When it was finally my turn, I ordered a dry cappuccino. The employees seemed to operate very efficiently, and my coffee was made immediately. If I had seen the little shelf of pastries below the window before I ordered, I would have asked for a plain croissant as well. But never mind--Rick and I would be having some very nice food in the City soon enough.
When the train arrived, we climbed upstairs and seated ourselves on one side of the narrow carriage, with a rack for bicycles between our seats and the other side. As we rode through Redwood City, Hillsdale, San Mateo, and Millbrae along the west coast of the San Francisco Bay, I sipped my cappuccino. And once again the coffee wasn’t really robust enough for my tastes, but it was quite pleasant.
“Saint Frank” obviously refers to San Francisco, but it was also named in reference to Saint Francis, whose passion for life and people inspired founder Kevin Bohlin, who started the business ten years earlier. The company travels around the world to meet with the small-scale coffee farmers with whom they do business, so once again this is a very ethical company.
The name, however, kept reminding me of an old joke, one where I can’t remember the entire joke itself but only the punchline: “I left my harp in Sam Frank’s disco.” Fortunately Rick and I hadn’t brought any musical instruments with us, so we didn’t have to worry about this sort of thing happening.
On my final morning before flying back to the UK, I went with Vicky and Rick to a local cafe for breakfast, Son & Garden. It was a lovely, cool, and cloudy morning, and strangely enough I had just learned that I would be returning to a heat wave in Sheffield. The three of us were seated out on the heated patio where we could see directly into the rentable Photo Studio room, which was overflowing with a floral motif. The cafe features floral-themed high teas, and at the time of writing this review, the theme is of course a Barbie Dreamhouse High Tea, with Barbie Mimosas available.
The three of us all went for the Smoked Salmon Benedict with asparagus, rainbow potatoes, and levain. And Rick and I both had Americanos, which were actually really decent, so it was a great starter to my extremely long day. The waitress warned us that the smoked salmon was “raw”, so I had assumed she meant cold smoked salmon (like lox) rather than hot smoked salmon. But when we were served, I realised what she meant was more like sashimi, meaning, um, raw salmon, with not much of a smoky taste at all. And sadly the asparagus was way too undercooked and quite crunchy, so seeing as how it was lying underneath the poached eggs and salmon, this made it pretty much impossible to cut and eat complete bites. So the meal was not quite as good as I was expecting -- but perhaps it was just this one day. But the coffee is great; and if I find myself there again, I think I may go for something else, like the crab omelette or the veggie burger.
Aside from this Menlo Park location, there is also a Son & Garden in San Francisco and one in Palo Alto.
Speaking of having breakfast with Rick and Vicky reminds me of an email conversation from a year ago about a unique bathroom fixture:
The remodel for both of my girlfriend Vicky’s bathrooms started in March and was just completed a few weeks ago. In the guest bathroom it involved replacing a tub with a shower; in the second it involved moving the shower, toilet and sink and enlarging the shower, which actually left it seeming more spacious.Related Links