One of San Francisco’s most hyped coffee roasters, Mokhtar Alkhanshali, is teaming up with one of San Francisco’s most storied literary titans, Dave Eggers, to open a cafe at Art + Water, a new arts nonprofit set in a 70,000-square-foot space at Pier 29 in late summer or fall 2026. The Tenderloin-raised Alkhanshali, widely considered the pioneer of specialty Yemeni coffee in San Francisco, has spent more than a decade importing coffee to the Bay Area. He’ll handle a large cafe space inside the location, which will also serve as a home for a new coffee brand, offer free studio space for artists, and feature some 10,000-square-feet of gallery space, according to a long blog post Eggers posted to his literary arts company and press, McSweeney’s.
“[Eggers] noticed there was no coffee in that entire area,” Alkhanshali says. “He could have had 1,000 people open a cafe there. But what he wants to build, it’s going to be its own world.”
Eggers and Alkhanshali have discussed the idea of opening a cafe together for years. While there are not many firm details yet, Alkhanshali says the cafe is not going to be like anything San Franciscans have access to currently, referencing cafes from the 18th and 19th centuries like those in the cities of Sana’a, Cairo, or even old Boston as comparable examples. Fittingly with the nonprofit’s aims, cities where cafes stimulated revolution. Lots of ornate rugs and plants provided by San Francisco nursery Flora Grubb will decorate the cafe.
The menu is also TBD at this point, but Alkhanshali says his famous Port of Mokha roaster will not be featured in the space; instead, he is hard at work on what he calls the first luxury coffee company, utilizing his roasted beans, sourced from farmer partners across five regions. Drinks will be served alongside food accompaniments in a setup Alhanshali compares to high tea time or omakase-style service. There will be a food menu outside of pairings too, and chocolates and other specialty goods may be available to purchase.
Eggers — who wrote Monk of Mokha, which details Alkhanshali’s childhood and rise to prominence in the coffee industry, including training with Marin County coffee grader Willem Boot — reached out to Alkhanshali a week before the McSweeney’s post went out to show him the space and recruit the roaster to run the coffee arm of the project.
“This was like Willy Wonka showing you the plans to the factory before you built it,” Alhanshali says.
Art + Water will host rotating artists, who will get free studio space while facilitating workshops with other, emerging artists. The nonprofit will split the space with Community Arts Stabilization Trust, an SF nonprofit dedicated to preserving art in the city. The location will house San Francisco visual artists including Paul Madonna and Taraneh Hemani; the Art + Water team hopes to serve as a “satellite” for those and others to continue to hang their work after being priced out of other galleries. Applications to apply to Art + Water’s inaugural fellowship will be available soon via the nonprofit’s social media.
Alkhanshali also plans to host events and artists in the cafe. Both he and Eggers are excited to drive home the artist-apprentice model in both the nonprofit’s programming and in the cafe, reinforcing the idea that practitioners can achieve craft and skill, in both coffee and art, in ways that are not meant to be scalable or profit-seeking.
Art + Water and the currently unnamed cafe arm will open in summer or fall 2026.
Editor’s note: Paolo Bicchieri worked for 826 Valencia, a nonprofit co-founded by Eggers, from 2018 to 2020.