Now that donuts have made a return to Bay Area coffee houses--minus its exhausting Homer Simpsonesque, white-trash irony--you can find the preferable pastries at places like Ritual Coffee Roasters (vegan! and actually good!), Seattle's Best at Border's Books & Music (double-glazed), and even Starbucks (plasticky). With the return of the donut comes the return of the brewed coffee. At least, according to today's New York Times, which profiles the Blue Bottle Cafe, scheduled to......

Last year's Park(ing) Day at Ritual Coffee Roasters on Valencia Street. It's Park(ing) Day, folks. Today's the day REBAR, a San Francisco-based art collective, thought of taking parking spaces and turning them into public ones by creating fun-sized parks. Now cities all over the country are getting in on it. It's a fun idea and we recommend you check any number of these spaces out today before this happens to them. Community Walk has a......

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....

We still have no idea what exactly a "fixie" bike is (and at this point, we think we're having a better time imagining what one looks like than just walking out to Ritual Coffee and seeing one for ourselves), but we know they're destroying San Francisco bike culture -- just like Matier and Ross! The boys follow up their sensationalistic "Critical Mass attacks children" article from earlier this week to relate the tale of......

Last week's winner, the San Jose Metro: Again, we're reduced to reading it online, as our source wasn't in the South Bay this week. Cover article: fashion in the San Jose city hall. What are all these positions we're voting on for? A handy-dandy guide. Exciting inside SJ politics with the Fly, and their new SJ politics blog, SV411.org. Al Gore and his movie. Skateboarders come to town. And soft-shell crab. Next up, the SF......

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....

Boy--we sure love completely subjective awards, and we're super thankful for a chance to give out a few of our own. People who've been reading our "Trimethyldioxypurist" missives will not be especially surprised by the winners. For those who are strangers to our periodic ramblings about coffee and cafes around the City by the Bay, here are our favorites among the many, many cool, delicious, and often unique coffee choices at which we overcaffeinated......

Ritual Coffee, at 1026 Valencia Street in the Mission, opened just a few weeks ago and already appears to have a loyal following. And why not? Our first thoughts as we walked in on Sunday were something along the lines of "holy mother$%^^@ crap!" Because, man, this place is bee-yoo-ti-full. Huge space. Modern. Wood floors in front; tile in back. Understated decor. Okay, there's some weird stuffed animals on one wall for some reason.......