The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf in the Bay Area Financial District: A Review

The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf is basically a Starbucks clone chain, kind of new-ish to the Bay Area, apparently originating in L.A. and slowly creeping its way north and east over the last couple of decades. I don't know about any of the other locations, as this is the only one I've been to, but I'd rate it as maybe slightly better than Starbucks overall, but with worse coffee.

This particular location is between 4th and 5th along Market, an area surprisingly not well supplied by coffee shops other than the obligatory two or three Starbucks seemingly present on every downtown block. The interior is much more spacious and inviting than most downtown coffee shops, and also has a lot of patio tables set up outdoors. There's a good amount of tables inside and a large coffee table in the middle around which are some leather sofas and stuffed chairs.

Unfortunately the coffee and food is hidden behind a partition, and to see everything you must enter a cafeteria-style line, so if it is busy you are pretty much committed and can't change your mind about buying something. The menu is basically all the expected coffee drinks, tea, muffins, scones, some miscellaneous pastries, and bagels. Prices are average to slightly high for the area. A small coffee is $1.75, which is definitely high, and the size isn't any better than any of the cheaper places around. A bagel is a more reasonable $1.25, but they charge you an extra 50 cents for cream cheese, yet only give you one of those little generic packets of Philadelphia and want to charge you another 50 cents for another little packet if one isn't adequate. Most mom-and-pop places in downtown San Francisco charge around $1.75 for a bagel with cream cheese, but they also usually spread it on for you and give you a very generous amount. I don't know if Starbucks even has bagels, hell with eating at that place.

The main problem here isn't even really the pricing, but the coffee. It's pretty awful. I've tried it twice now and left both times wishing that I'd gotten McDonalds coffee instead. They only offer three options - Light, Dark and Decaf. The Light Blend has little flavor at all, and the Dark blend tastes like they uncovered the secret to burning water somehow. While that is an impressive scientific feat, it doesn't make for a very good morning beverage to start the day off with.

The one major positive here is that the environs are comfortable with lots of seating space, they offer free WiFi with no B.S. strings attached, and there's absolute scads of power outlets around, at least one set by every seat in the house if not two or three. So it's a great place if you need a coffee shop mainly for the purposes of doing some computer work or surfing ... I'd recommend maybe trying the tea leaf instead of the coffee bean at this one, however.