Hidden House Coffee

Ben Briggs didn't even like coffee, let alone specialty coffee, when he opened here with help from friends and family, and in 2013 a 5-kilo Primo arrived and Roasters joined the name. In March 2015 he was at this counter cupping nine coffees with his head roaster, an importer and the owner of Augie's, splitting a container of Ethiopian coffee he had brought back himself.

The shop is an 1890 cottage on Los Rios Street, one of the oldest continuously inhabited residential streets in California: yellow and gabled behind a green picket fence, with most of the seating out on the front patio under the jacarandas. Roaster, coffee bar and pastry kitchen share under 1,100 square feet inside against a reclaimed-wood wall, which is less a buildout than a house that was talked into it.