Ritual Coffee Roasters is a small cafe located off of Valencia street in the mission district of San Francisco, and yet it might be one of the most well known cafes in the world. I happen to have the good fortune of living in San Francisco and over the past 4 years I’ve probably spent almost 2 of those years in coffee houses. So in my time, this spot, Ritual Coffee Roasters cafe, has been a kind of haven for web 2.0 startups. I’ve seen digg founders to vc’s grab a cup of coffee here so I thought this birthplace of many-things-web 2.0 deserved a tip of the cap. So here goes…

Ritual Coffee Roasters is the most frequented hotspot for a lot of well known bloggers (I will leave names out here for the sake of privacy), web 2.0 startup hopefuls, and just people that want to be seen. Once you walk in be prepared to see a whole lot of Macbooks and Powerbooks, the first time I walked in every table from front to back had an Apple Powerbook. It was very twilight zone’ish, almost made me want to bring in my old Dell laptop (I own a Powerbook now) just to be different. Here are some reasons to check Ritual Coffee Roasters out…

Power outlets - every table pretty much has a power outlet next to it if you get the ones in the front.

Great Lighting - the environment is really well light and the lighting Ritual Coffee House put in was well thought out. Design was somthing the owners thought about and it is appreciated.

Good Coffee - the coffee is actually very good. Every week Stumptown Coffee Growers out of Portland, Oregon delivers beans to them so it’s fresh and unique. The taste is not over powering like Starbucks, not super sweet like Coffeebean, it’s a real balanced bean.

There are a few other web watering holes that are a little less well known, I go to one in north beach and the soma (hint it doubles as a laundry mat) but for the sake exploration and the joy of finding a hidden jewel of place in SF I’ll leave those unsaid.

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