A new cafe opening on the cusp of Laurel Heights and Pacific Heights is primed to introduce a little variety and deep-cut coffee nerdiness to an area infamously lacking in strong coffee options. Q Specialty Coffee is slated to debut on Saturday, October 18.
The new cafe comes from Cyrus Shen, the entrepreneur behind Toast’N Egg. After launching his Korean sando hit in 2024, Shen got seriously into coffee, earning his coffee grading certifications from Bay Area legend Willem Boot. Now the serial entrepreneur feels ready to dive into the coffee scene with strange, terrific brews. Q Specialty’s menu showcases the new, bold places coffee and tea are headed. “We believe it has the potential to become one of the top coffee destinations in the city,” Shen says.
The menu is dialed in to both online trends and heady coffee nerd Reddits. For the specialists, it reads like the Cliff Notes served by any of the top dogs in the cafe game, be it Cafe Shoji or Kope House. Customers can learn how many meters the coffee was grown above sea level, which plant varietals the fruit flowered from, and what processing techniques, be it oxygen-deprived or co-fermented, may apply to the beans. Pourovers, made on a slick new Poursteady PS1 machine, arrive with those notes on a small card; single-origin brews here are fruity, winey presents, like rare west side sun bathing Laurel Village in gold.
Cyrus Shen is no slouch in coffee. His coffee grading certifications are for the pros. Paolo Bicchieri
Those seasonal pourovers will rotate in and out of the cafe; to start, there’s a washed Honduras-grown La Avi — a blend of bourbon, catui, and lempia varietals — with tasting notes of caramel and apple cobbler. It has a cup score of 92, per the menu. Of course this grading system relies on the Coffee Quality Institute’s now-passe grading system, recently usurped by the Specialty Coffee Association to make way for the Coffee Value Assessment. (If you read that and it tracked, great! If not, it’s a debacle too difficult to explain neatly.)
The online-friendly side of things is aimed at younger drinkers with an algorithmically shared sweet tooth. There’s a chai latte with an espresso cloud topper and chai granola crumbled on top. There are also five specialty matcha drinks, including a triple matcha cloud, or cold foam, relying on three uses of the green tea and a sparkling lime matcha cloud introducing a carbonated Topo Chico-esque backbone. Maybe most fascinating, there’s a series of nitro cold brew drinks paired with fruit. If you’ve ever felt your foamy cold brew was lacking guava and jasmine tea, look no further. To eat, four flavors of Lady M Cake Boutique’s mille crepes are available, including Dubai chocolate and pistachio.
Following trends in Japan and Southeast Asia, Shen has a suite of green beans and roasting tech on-site. That includes two brand new Bellwether roasters. Guests can look at and smell the beans he and his mentor, connected through Boot, have selected. When they’re roasted, and then purchase them by the pound. Boot is one of the most well-vetted coffee educators in the Bay Area and the same arcanist who brought “the Monk of Mokha” and Tenderloin-raised Mokhtar Alkhanshali into the specialty coffee world.
Aesthetics are front and center at this newcomer. Paolo Bicchieri
The beakers and tubes are for more than show — they let guests get a sense of their coffee’s aroma in advance. Paolo Bicchieri
Shen says not enough places in San Francisco, a city with as many good cafes as New York has pizza parlors, care about the story behind the beans and the cafe experience. To that end, his new cafe — which sat empty for a decade before this revival — follows The Rules regarding third wave-looking, clean aesthetics. There’s a feeling of the Barn in Berlin, one of specialty’s innovators in the 2010s with burlap sacks on the ground and simple paper bags of coffee on the walls.
Shen is a student of such things: He’s run restaurants for more than 15 years. There was the Sunset’s Poke Origin, Daly City’s Shaking Crab, and Valencia Street’s Sugoi Sushi. His latest venture Toast N’ Egg was a mashup of all the coolest snacking and drinking trends. He says he’ll open another two Q Specialty Coffees in San Francisco before expanding the venture further afield. “I think this space was waiting for me,” Shen says.
Q Specialty Coffee (3490 California Street) opens Saturday, October 18 with hours 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. every day of the week.
The espresso lime cloud at Q Specialty Coffee is a not-too-sweet treat. Paolo Bicchieri