Caffe Trieste
Encyclopedia
Caffé Trieste is a chain
of six Italian
-themed coffeehouse
plus one retail store in the San Francisco Bay Area
, California
.
The Caffe Trieste was opened in 1956 by Giovanni Giotta (aka "Papa Gianni"), who in 1950 had emigrated to San Francisco, California, from the small fishing town of Rovigno, Italy (now part of Croatia
). Missing the espresso
houses of Trieste
, Italy
, Giotta opened his own cafe. Caffe Trieste is said to be the first espresso house on the West Coast.
(still a regular) , Alan Watts
, Jack Kerouac
, Allen Ginsberg
, Richard Brautigan
, Bob Kaufman
, Gregory Corso
, Michael McClure
, Kenneth Rexroth
and Neeli Cherkovski
, who lived in North Beach in the 1950s and 1960s. Jack Hirschman
, Poet Laureate
of San Francisco, has also been a regular patron. The Caffe has been featured in several movies, on television and radio and in many photography books. Francis Ford Coppola
wrote much of the screenplay
for The Godfather
while sitting in the Caffé Trieste. Its is also the home of the internationally chronicled Caffe Trieste Saturday Concert, the longest running show in the City of San Francisco (since 1971). Giotta Family members Papa Gianni, Ida (matron) and children Gianfranco, Sonia and Fabio have set-up a musical vibe with their performances at the Caffes and about Northern California and beyond, starting with their first radio appearance in the SF Bay Area in 1953. That vibe has attracted many famous artists and entertainment personalities that have visited or frequented the North Beach location: Bill Cosby, Joey Reynolds, Michael Douglas, Chris Isaak, Armando Peraza, Paul Kantner, Boz Scaags, Robert Vaughn, and Vincent Price to name a few. In 2009, for example, Israeli poet Roy Arad
visited the cafe and wrote about it in his diary http://notes.co.il/roy/58695.asp. It remains a favorite destination for writers, artists, hipsters, neighborhood residents, and tourists from all over the world. The Giotta Family has performed for celebrities such as Luciano Pavarotti and Frankie Laine, and has produced several videos and record albums, operates a newly built Hollywood Class recording studio (TRIESTE RECORDING STUDIOS) and is producing (together with Dissave Pictures of Berkeley, CA) a 90 minute documentary about founder and legend Papa Gianni Giotta, slated for release in 2010.
1978: Caffé Trieste opens a Sausalito
branch.
2004: Caffé Trieste becomes a chain, with a branch in Berkeley
and two more in San Francisco - one on Market Street (at Gough) and one on New Montgomery Street (at Howard).
2006: Caffé Trieste celebrates its 50th anniversary in April and rolls back its prices to 1956 levels, 2006. The August 2006 50th Anniversary Big Bash brings many celebrities and VIPs to the Caffe's stage, including Angela Alioto, Ron Elliott (musician)
(of The Beau Brummels
), Joey Reynolds, and many more, and 1200 people move through the small caffe in a few hours, while hundreds more celebrate at the block party outside!
2008: Caffé Trieste opens in downtown San Jose, the first location in the South Bay Area.
2009: Caffe Trieste opens in the Piedmont Avenue shopping district of Oakland, Ca.
37.79872°N 122.40727°W
Chain store
Chain stores are retail outlets that share a brand and central management, and usually have standardized business methods and practices. These characteristics also apply to chain restaurants and some service-oriented chain businesses. In retail, dining and many service categories, chain businesses...
of six Italian
Italian cuisine
Italian cuisine has developed through centuries of social and political changes, with roots as far back as the 4th century BCE. Italian cuisine in itself takes heavy influences, including Etruscan, ancient Greek, ancient Roman, Byzantine, Jewish and Arab cuisines...
-themed coffeehouse
Coffeehouse
A coffeehouse or coffee shop is an establishment which primarily serves prepared coffee or other hot beverages. It shares some of the characteristics of a bar, and some of the characteristics of a restaurant, but it is different from a cafeteria. As the name suggests, coffeehouses focus on...
plus one retail store in the San Francisco Bay Area
San Francisco Bay Area
The San Francisco Bay Area, commonly known as the Bay Area, is a populated region that surrounds the San Francisco and San Pablo estuaries in Northern California. The region encompasses metropolitan areas of San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose, along with smaller urban and rural areas...
, California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
.
The Caffe Trieste was opened in 1956 by Giovanni Giotta (aka "Papa Gianni"), who in 1950 had emigrated to San Francisco, California, from the small fishing town of Rovigno, Italy (now part of Croatia
Croatia
Croatia , officially the Republic of Croatia , is a unitary democratic parliamentary republic in Europe at the crossroads of the Mitteleuropa, the Balkans, and the Mediterranean. Its capital and largest city is Zagreb. The country is divided into 20 counties and the city of Zagreb. Croatia covers ...
). Missing the espresso
Espresso
Espresso is a concentrated beverage brewed by forcing a small amount of nearly boiling water under pressure through finely ground coffee. Espresso is widely known throughout the world....
houses of Trieste
Trieste
Trieste is a city and seaport in northeastern Italy. It is situated towards the end of a narrow strip of land lying between the Adriatic Sea and Italy's border with Slovenia, which lies almost immediately south and east of the city...
, Italy
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
, Giotta opened his own cafe. Caffe Trieste is said to be the first espresso house on the West Coast.
Cappuccino
The original Caffé Trieste in San Francisco's North Beach quickly became popular among the neighborhood's primarily Italian residents. "It was all Italian people," Giotta said of the neighborhood, "But I got the American people to like cappuccino." Papa Gianni Giotta is known as "The Espresso Pioneer", both in Italy and America, earning the label by having brought Espresso and Cappuccino to the West Coast, thus starting the Espresso Movement seen today. The company's Licensing Program promises to open, on a one-by-one, "non cookie-cutter" basis, more Trieste locations in the SF Bay Area, Northern California, Southern California, the Southwest and East Coast areas.A meeting place for authors and artists
The Caffé Trieste also becomes a convenient meeting place for Beat movement writers like Lawrence FerlinghettiLawrence Ferlinghetti
Lawrence Ferlinghetti is an American poet, painter, liberal activist, and the co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers...
(still a regular) , Alan Watts
Alan Watts
Alan Wilson Watts was a British philosopher, writer, and speaker, best known as an interpreter and popularizer of Eastern philosophy for a Western audience. Born in Chislehurst, he moved to the United States in 1938 and began Zen training in New York...
, Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac
Jean-Louis "Jack" Lebris de Kerouac was an American novelist and poet. He is considered a literary iconoclast and, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Kerouac is recognized for his spontaneous method of writing, covering topics such as Catholic...
, Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. He vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression...
, Richard Brautigan
Richard Brautigan
Richard Gary Brautigan was an American novelist, poet, and short story writer. His work often employs black comedy, parody, and satire. He is best known for his 1967 novel Trout Fishing in America.- Early life :...
, Bob Kaufman
Bob Kaufman
Bob Kaufman , born Robert Garnell Kaufman, was an American Beat poet and surrealist inspired by jazz music. In France, where his poetry had a large following, he was known as the "American Rimbaud."-Biography:...
, Gregory Corso
Gregory Corso
Gregory Nunzio Corso was an American poet, youngest of the inner circle of Beat Generation writers...
, Michael McClure
Michael McClure
Michael McClure is an American poet, playwright, songwriter, and novelist. After moving to San Francisco as a young man, he found fame as one of the five poets who read at the famous San Francisco Six Gallery reading in 1955 rendered in barely fictionalized terms in Jack Kerouac's Dharma Bums...
, Kenneth Rexroth
Kenneth Rexroth
Kenneth Rexroth was an American poet, translator and critical essayist. He is regarded as a central figure in the San Francisco Renaissance, and paved the groundwork for the movement...
and Neeli Cherkovski
Neeli Cherkovski
Neeli Cherkovski: Neeli Cherkovski: Neeli Cherkovski: (born Nelson Cherry, 1945, Santa Monica, California, Cherkovski grew up in San Bernardino, California. Cherkovski has resided in San Francisco since 1975 where he is known as a poet and memoirist. In the 1970s he was a political consultant in...
, who lived in North Beach in the 1950s and 1960s. Jack Hirschman
Jack Hirschman
Jack Hirschman is an American poet and social activist who has written more than 50 volumes of poetry and essays.-Biography:...
, Poet Laureate
Poet Laureate
A poet laureate is a poet officially appointed by a government and is often expected to compose poems for state occasions and other government events...
of San Francisco, has also been a regular patron. The Caffe has been featured in several movies, on television and radio and in many photography books. Francis Ford Coppola
Francis Ford Coppola
Francis Ford Coppola is an American film director, producer and screenwriter. He is widely acclaimed as one of Hollywood's most innovative and influential film directors...
wrote much of the screenplay
Screenplay
A screenplay or script is a written work that is made especially for a film or television program. Screenplays can be original works or adaptations from existing pieces of writing. In them, the movement, actions, expression, and dialogues of the characters are also narrated...
for The Godfather
The Godfather
The Godfather is a 1972 American epic crime film directed by Francis Ford Coppola, based on the 1969 novel by Mario Puzo. With a screenplay by Puzo, Coppola and an uncredited Robert Towne, the film stars Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, James Caan, Robert Duvall, Sterling Hayden, John Marley, Richard...
while sitting in the Caffé Trieste. Its is also the home of the internationally chronicled Caffe Trieste Saturday Concert, the longest running show in the City of San Francisco (since 1971). Giotta Family members Papa Gianni, Ida (matron) and children Gianfranco, Sonia and Fabio have set-up a musical vibe with their performances at the Caffes and about Northern California and beyond, starting with their first radio appearance in the SF Bay Area in 1953. That vibe has attracted many famous artists and entertainment personalities that have visited or frequented the North Beach location: Bill Cosby, Joey Reynolds, Michael Douglas, Chris Isaak, Armando Peraza, Paul Kantner, Boz Scaags, Robert Vaughn, and Vincent Price to name a few. In 2009, for example, Israeli poet Roy Arad
Roy Arad
Roy "Chicky" Arad is an Israeli poet, singer, script-writer and artist.-Poetry:Arad has published three books. In his first book, “The Nigger”, he formed a style that he called "Kimo" and defined as "a Hebrew adaptation of the Japanese Haiku": it consists of three lines of 10, 7, and 6 syllables...
visited the cafe and wrote about it in his diary http://notes.co.il/roy/58695.asp. It remains a favorite destination for writers, artists, hipsters, neighborhood residents, and tourists from all over the world. The Giotta Family has performed for celebrities such as Luciano Pavarotti and Frankie Laine, and has produced several videos and record albums, operates a newly built Hollywood Class recording studio (TRIESTE RECORDING STUDIOS) and is producing (together with Dissave Pictures of Berkeley, CA) a 90 minute documentary about founder and legend Papa Gianni Giotta, slated for release in 2010.
Timeline
1956: Caffé Trieste opens in San Francisco's North Beach.1978: Caffé Trieste opens a Sausalito
Sausalito, California
Sausalito is a San Francisco Bay Area city, in Marin County, California, United States. Sausalito is south-southeast of San Rafael, at an elevation of 13 feet . The population was 7,061 as of the 2010 census. The community is situated near the northern end of the Golden Gate Bridge, and prior to...
branch.
2004: Caffé Trieste becomes a chain, with a branch in Berkeley
Berkeley, California
Berkeley is a city on the east shore of the San Francisco Bay in Northern California, United States. Its neighbors to the south are the cities of Oakland and Emeryville. To the north is the city of Albany and the unincorporated community of Kensington...
and two more in San Francisco - one on Market Street (at Gough) and one on New Montgomery Street (at Howard).
2006: Caffé Trieste celebrates its 50th anniversary in April and rolls back its prices to 1956 levels, 2006. The August 2006 50th Anniversary Big Bash brings many celebrities and VIPs to the Caffe's stage, including Angela Alioto, Ron Elliott (musician)
Ron Elliott (musician)
Ron Elliott on October 21, 1943) is an American musician, composer and producer, best known as songwriter and lead guitarist of rock band The Beau Brummels. Elliott wrote or co-wrote the band's 1965 U.S...
(of The Beau Brummels
The Beau Brummels
The Beau Brummels were an American rock band. Formed in San Francisco in 1964, the band's original lineup included Sal Valentino , Ron Elliott , Ron Meagher , Declan Mulligan , and John Petersen...
), Joey Reynolds, and many more, and 1200 people move through the small caffe in a few hours, while hundreds more celebrate at the block party outside!
2008: Caffé Trieste opens in downtown San Jose, the first location in the South Bay Area.
2009: Caffe Trieste opens in the Piedmont Avenue shopping district of Oakland, Ca.
External links
37.79872°N 122.40727°W