Java Jitters in San Francisco, California: A Cafe Review

In spite of sounding like a medical condition that you should see your doctor about immediately, Java Jitters is a decent little cafe in an area not overwhelmingly well served by coffee shops. I have a few minor quibbles with it, but for the most part, I'm glad it's here.

It is located on Ocean Avenue in Ingleside, just steps from the main campus of the City College of San Francisco. Thus the vibe inside tends to cater to the student demographic, in which case here seems to be Asian kids who think they are African American rappers. They can go light to heavy on this sort of thing, I guess it depends on who the barista is at the time and what music they decide they want to blast. In the early to mid afternoon they seem to take it easy on the music and the "wiggy wiggy wiggy" stuff and that's usually the best time to drop in.

The interior is adequately nice if you can get over the fact that it's attached to La Parilla Grill with no wall separating the two, apparently La Parilla decided to get through these tough economic times by renting out half of their dining space to the cafe. Sometimes you might smell Mexican food cooking up which may or may not go with your coffee. One thing worth enduring all this is the fact that they have fast and no-strings-attached free WiFi, though there's very little in the way of power outlets. I guess if you want WiFi with some Mexican for lunch or dinner you could go over to La Parilla and mooch from there too. Bueno!

My main beef here is with the coffee, they used to serve Ritual Roasters which is pretty decent, but they've recently changed over to the trendy hipster Four Barrel. I guess it's a matter of personal preference but I really don't much care for the stuff so it's pretty much driven me out of the store. They make the coffee with a French press, which only people who don't seem to know how French presses work think makes much of a difference in the flavor. It actually ups the odds of the barista jacking up the coffee, because with a French press the grounds are directly in contact with the water the whole time, and if you leave them like that for more than twenty minutes or so it makes the coffee really bitter. So you're kind of rolling the dice on that one. I think they do it just to save on electricity rather than for any kind of flavor or technique, honestly.

The big plus here is that they have pretty good pastries and sweets, which this general area is majorly lacking, and also some pretty decent and large sandwiches for about six bucks. Most of the servers are also really cool and the owners are reputedly good peeps. So I wish them well, it's still a good spot for a sandwich, pastry or some WiFi, I've gotta keep moving along for the coffee though unfortunately.