Gallery Cafe is at the corner of Washington & Mason, right across from the San Francisco Cable Car Museum. Here, they dispense with the questions about "which bean" or "which blend." Your choices are "leaded" or "unleaded"; the only bean is the best, made for purists. The cafe serves "La Colombe Torrefaction" -- a brand that is rarely served locally (Asia de Cuba being one of the few others that do, if any); even so, Gallery Cafe is the only local place you can actually buy the beans whole.

While we're usually fairly easy to please and generally go for whatever's "on tap" (i.e., drip coffee), this is one establishment where we must go for the fancy stuff, if only to experience what manager Estrella Tadeo refers to as "latte art." The lattes are indeed little pieces of art, perhaps more behind the name "Gallery Cafe" than the scattered paintings. Hearts, rosettes, leaves -- delicate designs in milk foam are fascinating enough to give pause, even in spite of caffeine jones to the point of shaking. The "latte art" is an excellent waking-up counterpoint to the clover-leaf-in-foam-topped Guinness that helped put us down the night before.