The first cafe space for Indonesian coffee roaster Beaneka Coffee Roastery is home to Firebrand pastries, a delightful and warm service staff, and some of the rarest coffee drinks in the Bay Area. That’s because until now, SanDai in Walnut Creek’s Kopi Bar was the only dedicated place for avocado and chocolate coffee drinks. Now, steps from the San Francisco Bay, grab an iced pandan coffee and nastar (pineapple shortbread) to enjoy while you take in the sights.

Wrecking Ball’s Trish Rothgeb is known for her well-balanced espresso drinks and precise, technologically advanced pour-overs — plus, she coined the now popular “waves of coffee” terminology. Visit the original Cow Hollow location and order an espresso or any of their specialty drinks, such as the shop’s espresso citron tonic, plus a bag of beans for the road.

Saint Frank is to San Francisco coffee as Dungeness crab is to San Francisco restaurants: when the time is right in the city, nothing else will do. Owner and founder Kevin Bohlin’s been on a spree, too, as he opened choux paradise Juniper on Polk Street in 2023 and a second San Francisco Saint Frank location in SoMa. Longtime fans return for the gorgeous service, minimal aesthetic, and tea-like Bolivian coffees.

When Not Latte hit Irving Street in spring 2022, it marked the arrival of one of the city’s first dedicated fruit coffee shops. Now, as coffee continues to find imaginative and wonderful iterations, Outset on Valencia and New Montgomery streets takes the form to the next level. The Outset Americano is a medley of Ethiopian coffee plus not-from-concentrate orange juice, jasmine green tea, and orange syrup. It is a delicate, multi-textural drink unlike anything else in the city. And, gratefully, caffeinating to boot.

The Scullery is a little nook of a coffee shop with a smattering of outdoor seating, and the thrum of traffic booming on Geary Street outside. The team at this cafe is tuned into the specialty coffee world, serving East Bay favorite Mother Tongue Coffee and top-tier toast, too.

Sextant founder Kinani Ahmed works directly with Ethiopian, Kenyan, and Colombian growers, making high-end but affordable beans to-go. In this chunk of the city, Sextant is alone in offering terrific coffees and delicious pastries from Firebrand Artisan Breads.

If you’re looking for a SoMa coffee shop with some extra oomph (namely, signature drinks that’d be tough to find elsewhere), head over to Telescope Coffee. Not only does this cute shop offer the usual suspects in coffee — espressos, flat whites, lattes, and more — but there are also non-coffee and coffee-adjacent drinks to take on if you’ve reached your caffeine limit. The seasonal latte offerings change, such as a recent honeycomb latte, but the strawberry milk is regular option and comes served in a cute strawberry-shaped glass, a stunner in both tastes and looks.

This coffee shop on the eastern edge of Golden Gate Park is both a familiar favorite and a high-quality, fourth-wave business. That’s because founder and owner Aquiles Guerrero was born in Nicaragua before coming to the city in the 1980s where he worked at Martha & Bros Coffee Co. The business is expanding and it’s the high-quality pour-overs and drippers that keeps business booming.

SPRO is known for its playful and inventive coffee drinks. Beyond the usual roster of lattes, mochas, and pour-overs, coffee drinkers can explore options like the Cold Fashioned, which takes cold brew and mixes it with orange bitters and gum syrup, topped with a Luxardo cherry and a flamed orange twist. There are three locations to choose from, including a Mission Bay outpost and a spot in the Tenderloin, along with this location on Church Street.

Alex Pong’s Paper Son pop-up is a crowning achievement in the city’s vast coffee game, merging his Asian American heritage with his top-tier espresso and pour-over skills. The espresso passionfruit tonic is a bubbly love letter to the fruit notes coffee snobs love, and Paper Son’s riff on Thai iced tea, the Thai Tea Cloud, is as well-bodied an iteration as they come in San Francisco. The team opened a second location downtown at 303 Second Street N102 that’s open Monday through Friday, thanks to the city’s Vacant to Vibrant program.

More than 11 years into its journey, Grand Coffee opened a second location a block away from its mini cafe on Mission Street. The shop also serves its coffee at the Grove at Yerba Buena and keeps customers buzzed during Ramadan. Located next door to Alamo Drafthouse, the new shop is spacious and bright, and working through a two-person Chemex at the tiled bar is a delight.

Lea Sabado and Andre Higgenbotham opened this Excelsior neighborhood shop in 2019 with a healthy following of motorcycle fans excited to see a Black and brown-owned business in a very white coffee scene. The shop makes a mean chai, but more relevantly this is the only specialty shop in the area with strong but not overly dark roasts.

Ocean Avenue plays host to lots of fantastic restaurants and bars, but few destinations are as open, enormous, and affordable as Java on Ocean. The shop features tons of specialty drinks, and not specialty coffee, mind you, but items like rose, lavender, and zebra lattes.