The Howard Street Coffee Roastery in San Francisco, California: A Review

With a name like the Howard Street Coffee Roastery, you'd expect this to be a place that emphasizes killer beans. In actual fact, however, the coffee here ranges from mediocre to kinda bad.

Good coffee doesn't always make a coffee shop, however. Sometimes you just want a nice place to sit in the morning, clean, spacious, with a good atmosphere, never too crowded. This is the role that Howard Street Coffee Roastery fills in the coffee shop pantheon of the South of Market / Financial District area.

Located at the corner of 180 Howard, there's literally three Starbucks and a Peet's within a block and a half's walk, so the huge crowds of office workers are largely siphoned off, leaving a steady but manageable stream to frequent this place. Most of the business seems to be people grabbing coffee "to go", so there's almost always seats available.

Another big plus here are the two sweet ladies who always seem to work in the mornings and early afternoons, and whom I assume are the owners or part of the owning family. Aside from just generally being a better thing for your neighborhood to support local community business, you get a welcoming vibe here that the perpetually maltreated baristas at the corporate chains just can't ever accurately fake no matter how many training videos their managers show them.

As mentioned, if there's any weakness it's the coffee. The generic house blend is a little too bitter and just has an "off" flavor, and they also charge the rather high Financial District standard prices of $1.50 for a 2 oz. and $1.75 for a 16 oz. The plus to the coffee is that it takes cream and half and half really well, and they have a whole plethora of things to sweeten it up with. There's honey, brown sugar, even grated chocolate and white chocolate. A little brown sugar and a good dose of grated chocolate greatly improves the coffee flavor here. They also have various generic donuts and pastries, and bagels which are none too large or overwhelmingly tasty for the asking price, but everything is basically acceptable in a pinch. They sell various beans for about $10.75 per pound, but given the quality of the house drip I think I'll stick with my $5 per pound Castro Cheesery specials.

The lunch menu, which is mostly salads and paninis, is decidedly a little too yuppie for me (mostly in reference to the pricing.) But I like this place for being a mostly quiet, fairly spacious and comfortable environment in which to get off the mean streets of San Francisco in the morning and just relax for a bit. A nice refuge if you grow tired of the massive crowds and general lameness at Peet's and Starbucks, though be ready to spike the coffee heavily.