We take information for granted. It has become so easy to find things with Internet access that it is hard to remember when it was difficult to locate things. I was in Dallas for meetings and decided to check out some local cafés. I logged on and went to indiecoffeeshops.com, where I was rewarded with a list of several dozen places to visit. Staying downtown, I narrowed my search to Deep Ellum and decided to visit three different ones.

Mokah Café is a neat indy café, with amps, speakers and musical equipment stacked in the corner. Comfy sofas and mismatched tables and chairs that all fit together complete the space. Funky lamps illuminate the large room but don’t shed a lot of light. It was quiet on my visit, with only one other customer working quietly in the corner. That suited me fine since I needed to catch up on some work. I enjoyed the quiet, with no inane cell conversations next to me from people with Bluetooth headsets yelling into the air, mothers chugging nonfat lattes and pushing oversized strollers with screaming kids. This was a coffee shop as they used to be, with good coffee, a dark room and a soothing feel. It was a delightful change of pace and peace, and I enjoyed the vibe.

Murray Street Coffee has a very different feel. A two-story space that is light and airy, it also has the eclectic look of an independent café with an assortment of chairs, tables, stools and seats, but with a more contemporary feeling. It is a comfortable place to work and relax. With its split levels, there are three areas to sit, so it is quieter than cafés that are a large single room. The Sumatran coffee was strong, the cookie was fresh, and with music in the background, lots of power plugs, free Wi-Fi and a great sandwich, I could see making this a place to hang out and work on future trips to Dallas.

Café Brazil popped up in my search, so I decided to check it out. It is a loud, colorful restaurant, with a self-serve coffee bar with airpots and seven kinds of coffee, regular and flavored. Of course, I tried the namesake Brazil. Can’t say it was overwhelming, so I wouldn’t come rushing back only for the coffee. But the guacamole, chips and salsa were fantastic! And the food everyone else around me was enjoying looked equally tempting. Having a real snack was a good way to end my morning of coffee-shop visits.

At Humphrey Slocombe ice cream, it is all about interesting flavors and unusual combinations.  Tucked in a corner of the Mission, they make all of their ice cream in the small store. In the dipping cabinet were tubs with such pairings as Bourbon and Cornflakes, Guinness and Gingerbread, Chocolate and Ancho Chile, and Vietnamese Coffee, using coffee from Blue Bottle, a local coffee roaster. After I had walked around the city all morning and consumed four cups of coffee at different cafés, a dish of their ice cream was the perfect way to relax.

Smooth and creamy, the flavors worked well. Spicy chocolate can be overpowering if too much chile is added, but this one had enough flavor to give added zip to the chocolate but not so much heat as to overwhelm the taste buds. The Vietnamese Coffee was creamy and mild, making me think about iced Vietnamese coffee I had tried in Ho Chi Minh City.

The store is small, with about a half dozen stools at a counter in the window. When I walked in, I was the only customer. While I was seated at the counter, finishing my cup, the store became suddenly packed, with a line extending out the door onto the sidewalk, like all of the other places I visited this morning. I wanted to try the Limoncello sorbet to cleanse my palate before I left, but I didn’t want to stand in line again. But now I have an excuse to return and try some more interesting combinations.

I usually don’t talk to people when I visit places to write about and am generally unaware of people around me. Seated in Tartine, the terrific little bakery I visited, I sat at a tiny table to write a blog post titled a Coffee Tour of San Francisco. As I finished, I cleared my dishes to make room for the two friends who were hovering to grab my table. Standing next to the bus tubs was a man who suddenly asked if I had a recommendation for a coffee shop to visit.  He explained that he had read the title of my blog post on my laptop as he was waiting in line for his pastries. With a slight European accent, he said he was looking for a good espresso macchiato and had already tried Blue Bottle. I told him about 4 Barrel and Ritual Roasters. I told him that he was drinking 4 Barrel at Tartine, but he wanted to visit the store a few blocks away. As we exchanged pleasantries, he said he was visiting San Francisco for the Fancy Food show, as was I. And, of course, he could only be in the chocolate business! He works for a Belgian chocolate company that I knew well. As we exchanged cards, I noticed his driver’s license in his wallet, which looked familiar. It was from Colorado, and he lived in Boulder. We discussed some people we both knew, and I invited him to join us that evening at a reception of other chocolate professionals. Small world.

Tartine Coffee and Pastries

It was a beautiful Saturday morning in the city, and I had several hours to kill before my meetings began. Upon the advice of some locals, I visited their suggested cafés. Picking up the BART at Powell, I rode to 16^th and Mission and then walked to 4 Barrel Coffee. Upon entering, on the right is a small coffee bar where they serve different coffees by the cup. I chose the Kenya Kikuru, a fruity, slightly acidic cup that looked murky in the cup but tasted great. Other single-origin choices included, among others, coffees from Sumatra, Nicaragua and Ethiopia.  The single-cup offerings could be purchased as either espresso or drip coffee. The center of the store is the regular counter for ordering, and in the back is the coffee roaster surrounded by bags of green coffee beans. Space was tight, so I finished my coffee and headed to the next stop for a pastry.

Four Barrel Roasters

Tartine was recommended as the best pastry shop in the city, and I can see why. When I arrived, the line snaked out the door. Inside, every seat was taken, with people standing at counters eating their treats. The illuminated display case was filled with cakes, tarts and cookies, while the adjacent case contained croissants, scones, quiches and sandwiches. Behind the tiny coffee bar in the corner, a barista tried to keep up with drink orders. The chocolate items all use Valrhona, a well-known, very-high-quality French chocolate that I have worked with for years.  I had to smile when I saw the Opera cake, a traditional chocolate cake with a shiny mirror finish decorated with real gold leaf. Years ago, one of the chocolates I made was called a palet d’or, a small chocolate decorated with gold leaf. Applying the paper-thin sheets of gold as decoration is difficult because the sheets are so flexible and stick to everything, so if you are not careful you end up gilding everything in sight. These cakes, however, were beautiful. My order from the pastry case included a chocolate ganache tart, meringues with cocoa nibs, shortbread and a chocolate brownie. The brownie was individually wrapped, so I knew I could save it for later!  Upon paying, I received my coffee cup and handed it to the barista, who directed me to self-serve airpots in the corner. I had to smile — the coffee was from 4 Barrel roasters. The black coffee was a great contrast to the sweet meringues and rich chocolate tart I enjoyed. As I sat at the tiny single table, enjoying my snack, the line to enter continued to expand down the block, and people continued to come and order. Everywhere, people were sitting, standing and enjoying pastries and coffee, but I had been sitting for a while, and I was sure that somebody could use my seat. It was time to go

Cakes at Tartine

Walking to Ritual Coffee Roasters, the café that was the most highly recommended by my friends, I passed several other coffee shops. I walked into two of them and promptly walked out. After my last two experiences with places that were jammed, it felt odd walking into a café with so few people. So I kept walking. I knew I had arrived when I saw a line of people patiently waiting to enter. Ritual Coffee Roasters has a striking, simple logo and a clean, Spartan interior. The focus is on the coffee, and they are clearly passionate about sourcing and serving the best coffee. A book on the counter displays photographs and information about each single origin. When I arrived, they were serving Finca Los Andes, a Cup of Excellence coffee from El Salvador, which their literature describes as “sweet and creamy, with flavors of blackberry, orange, and maple.” With medium body and crisp acidity, it was a nice way to end my day of coffee tasting and my tour of some of San Francisco’s best independent cafés.

Ritual Coffee

On my recent trip to Brazil, I visited the Coffee Museum in Santos. The museum is housed in the building where coffee traders would meet to sell their coffee: the Bolsa Official de Café, or Brazilian Coffee Exchange. It opened in 1922 and operated until 1954. With its marble floors, stained-glass windows, frescos and carved wooden seats, it is an ornate monument to the power of coffee and the wealth and prestige it brought to its purveyors. Brokers sat in the Auction Room in their reserved seats on the main floor, which were purchased just as seats on a stock exchange can be occupied only by members. Above, in the second-floor gallery, farmers, producers and associates would look down upon the activity.

The Coffee Exchange

Throughout the building are exhibits speaking to the impact of coffee on Brazil. The legend is that coffee was introduced to the country in the early 1700s, supposedly smuggled in as a few seedlings given by the lover of a French naval captain as a gift before he left French Guyana headed for South America. Whether the legend is true or not, the seedlings thrived and became a major crop. The growth of the coffee industry in Brazil helped the country develop in other ways, helping attract immigrants, establish a working class and develop a strong transportation and electrical network to ensure the rapid movement of the crop to the port.

The stained-glass ceiling

With the abolition of slavery in the 1800s, the sugar crop was diminished and the focus shifted to coffee. Brazil aggressively worked to attract immigrants from Europe to work on the coffee plantations and soon had a thriving Italian community, as well as a number of Germans, Poles, Japanese and others who chose to work in the fields. Almost 1 million Europeans came to Brazil during that period. The railway network was developed to ship loads of beans from the outlying provinces to the ports. The pace of expansion was remarkable. In 20 years, the rail network grew from 200 kilometers to more than 6,500 kilometers of track. The train station in Santos was constructed just a few blocks from the Coffee Exchange, which was the center of economic activity in Santos. Wealthy merchants who lived and traded near the building inhabited the area around the exchange. Coffee was so important that there are still mosaics of coffee beans in the streets and on the walls of buildings, and the collection box of a nearby church is even decorated with beans!

The Coffee Exchange Seats

Santos became the most important port in Brazil because of the amount of coffee that was shipped from its docks. On the docks, laborers would hoist the 60-kilogram bags on their backs, and some of them would carry as many as five sacks at a time. There is a statue of one of the dockworkers inside the exchange, showing the tremendous weight of coffee that he shouldered – almost 700 pounds at a time. And the economic impact of that coffee on Brazil was staggering. At that time, coffee passing through Santos accounted for almost 50 percent of the world’s supply and almost 60 percent of Brazil’s GDP. Today, the amount of Brazilian coffee shipped globally accounts for almost 30 percent of the world’s consumption but less than 5 percent of Brazil’s GDP, as the economy has diversified. Still, coffee remains an important crop and was the springboard that helped create Brazil’s modern economy, the eighth largest in the world. The exchange is no longer used, standing now as a museum as a testament to a time when coffee was the most important commodity in Brazil, helping modernize and develop the country and secure its place in the world.