A man after our own hearts, Nick Cho of Wrecking Ball Coffee and Twitter-no-holds-barred notoriety is opening a new café in the Mission District with the goal of preventing further gentrification of the area. He wants to appeal to the Spanish-speaking, low income locals — but how?
The man is as outspoken about cold brew (he thinks it’s regressive and basically tastes like stale coffee, which is…technically true) as he is about toxic masculinity. But whatever you think about his approach to social media, the latest brainchild of the speciality coffee connoisseur is certainly something to be lauded and modelled after in future iterations of the evolving coffee business model.
Speaking in San Francisco Magazine, Cho and his wife, Trish Rothgeb — a coffee institution in her own right, being one of the first certified Q-graders in the US — plan to open a 1,000 square feet cafe on the aptly named Mission Street, which will eschew the tattoos and beards worn by the cult of hipsterdom, and instead of offering $5-6/pop (£3.80-4.60 at time of writing) pourovers to work-from-home coffee connoisseurs, instead will focus its offering on the local working class clientele.
Catering to the local, Spanish-speaking community
Obviously leading with the title above, the logical first step for Cho was to offer a menu that was completely bilingual. This is to be posted in the front window of the shop, alongside a team of bilingual shop staff.
He plans to bring down prices slightly by using a different selection of coffee beans and milk etc. The coffee is still speciality grade, roasted freshly etc., but he’s looking for areas which impact the price, with marginal differences to the final cup.
The time and resource consuming pour over — something Cho is known to be a master of — will not be offered at the new cafe.
“We’re not going to fix gentrification with one café. But we’re not going to fix gentrification if no one tries to do anything a little differently.”
