After a year spent operating as a humble coffee kiosk and roastery, Sightglass Coffee is finally ready to unveil their Folsom Street warehouse coffee bar and jittery hangout spot tomorrow. Like Coffee Bar and The Summit before it, the new full-service joint is the latest in the recent trend towards coffee shops that are less café-like and more of a haven for midday throngs of laptop jockeys. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Before tomorrow's opening, our fellow sleepless disciples of the brewed brown bean at Tablehopper recently peered behind the scenes to bring us the details:
The enormous, light-filled, multi-level warehouse has a lot to offer: there’s the Probat roaster (and a counter) in the front, and the back has a large poured-concrete oval bar, with two sides that will be able to caffeinate your sleepy self. Yup, there will be a brew bar on each side, and two espresso machines: a Slayer, and a La Marzocco Strada EP, one of only six in the U.S.
That rumbling noise you're hearing right now is the sound of La Marzocco fetishists everywhere flocking to 7th and Folsom for a shot of espresso. And because no San Francisco food and drink spot is complete without some piece of reclaimed furniture and a mildly interesting backstory, they've even got shelving recovered from the Library of Congress which will be displaying the sort of brewing contraptions currently popular with the coffee purists. (Proving some have more reverence for their morning brew than, say - the works of Mark Twain.)
If you've still got an appetite after coating your stomach with an oilslick of coffee, Sightglass will also be serving up bites from other local favorites like Firebrand, Hooker's Sweet Treats and Tell Tale Preserve Company, which hopefully means we can expect to see the Rebel Within popping up outside of the Ferry Building.
