Results tagged “eileenhassi”

Try drowning Dave Eggers, Michelle Tea, Stephen Elliott, Beth Lisick, Barb Bersche, Eileen Hassi, or 826 Program Director Erin Neeley, via a dunking booth, this Sunday afternoon at the first 8/26 Day Festival.

Ritual Coffee Roasters' two locations are only about three miles apart. Not so bad on a bike, right? Well, what if you're biking with 130 pounds of coffee? Yeah, a little tougher. This Saturday, popular cafe Ritual Roasters, in conjunction with Bikes to Rwanda, is having a wacky, multi-tiered charity event that involves bike-race betting, film-watching, a raffle, and the consumption of both of our favorite beverages: booze and coffee.

In part one of our spotlight on Ritual Roasters, we told you the backstory behind one the the Mission's most popular new cafes. We did, however, save one important component of that story for this follow-up: the origin of the name. Sure, the name "Ritual Roasters," resonates, has nice alliteration, and may seem like a no-brainer. For Eileen Hassi and Jeremy Tooker, though, the process was agonizing.

"Our friends pitied us when they saw this place," says Eileen Hassi, co-proprietor of red-hot Mission District cafe Ritual Roasters. "They told us we were doing everything wrong." Jeremy Tooker, her co-proprietor, agreed. "We had too much space, they said," he says. "We'd never fill the tables. The streets around here were dead before 10 a.m." What may have seemed a series of missteps and misadventures to Hassi and Tooker's peers turned out to be serendipity -- the stuff that goes into the best of origin stories. Stuffed into the back office, under the eyes of a giant millipede for whom the gang was pet sitting, the Eileen and Jeremy talked to SFist about how and why they got their start, what it's like to run a small business in one of San Francisco's hippest 'hoods, some of the keys to their recent success, and what's next to come.