Peet's

Peet's at Vine and Walnut Street in Berkeley.

No doubt the best coffee in the world.  

Moe reminds me that Stanford MBA Jerry Baldwin talked to Alfred Peet about how to make coffee then went on to found Starbucks in '71 (which does not have very good coffee - but I enjoy its everywhere).  

The beauty of the Walnut store is the people - way Berkeley.  There is the old dude with a red bandana and "Peace Out" t-shirt; the middle-aged women with stringy grey hair reading the NYTs and wearing birkenstocks (and socks); a yuppie dad and his two kids .. and everybody taking their time despite .. coffee. Unusually people talk to each other: I overhear bandana ask a younger women about climbing North Face and she if very happy to engage him.  The original Peet's about a ten minute downhill walk from where I grew up and I used to pass it every day on my way to swimming.


So I arrive in the BA yesterday afternoon following a long plane flight which is not getting shorter. My two aunts Marcia and Carla with Grace and Moe, returning from the Sierras. We have dinner together before I peel out to the Shattuck Hotel for the night since 1530 otherwise full quarters. 

The Shattuck Hotel is a couple of blocks from Cal and kinda neat - the original opened in 1907 during the re-build of San Francisco following the great earthquate-fire which leveled the city - some developer thought the East Bay as good, or even a better bet given the peninsula flattened. Before that, there was a Victorian estate dating to the 1860s and owned by Francis Kittredge Shattuck.  

The 'new' Shattuck Hotel opened three months ago folowing a $multi-million restoration and seems pretty buzzy for Berkeley.