Popular Chicago-based, LA-approved coffee company Intelligentsia will soon join the ranks of San Francisco's fourth wave, glass-and-steel-and-reclaimed wood coffee houses. The company, which has seven coffee bars in Chicago and LA, will be taking over the Ecco Caffe space in Potrero Hill just as soon as it can undergo a fresh remodel.
Intelligentsia San Francisco, as the new location has been creatively named, will sport a neighborhood-specific look, of course. As the company's marketing director tells Inside Scoop, “All the Intelligentsia locations really are very different, unique to their neighborhoods. It’s not a cookie cutter process... It’ll be unlike any of our other coffee bars.”
The Chicago company actually took over Ecco's roasting operation when they bought the Santa Rosa-based company back in 2009, but the redesign and new retail space will make the Mariposa Street coffee bar the company's first under their own brand name. Ecco Coffee will live on as a line of high-end, hard-to-find coffee beans.
As Morrissey explained to coffee blog Sprudge last week the bar itself is still in the design stages and probably won't open until early next year. In the meantime, we wouldn't be surprised to see a coffee kiosk pop up near 1125 Mariposa, as is de rigeur before opening coffee shops these days.
And now, here's a video of a guy in a vest making about a cup with a complicated coffee contraption at the Venice, CA location:
[Sprudge]
[InsideScoop]