7 days ago
Why San Francisco's Go-To Spot for Matcha Is A Bookstore by the Beach
It's Monday at one p.m. and the bookstore near Ocean Beach is booming with customers. There are elderly folk working through black coffee in the 'analog space,' a four-top table by the window. But it's the menu at the bookstore's cafe that gets all the attention. Local hitmakers Loquat, Little Bee Bakery, Dynamo Donut, and Florecita Panaderia all grace the pastry case. It's Rocky's Matcha — the only place in the city to serve the SoCal-made green tea purveyor — that earned the business a huge fanbase, though.
The contrast from summer 2025 to 2022 when Blackbird moved to Irving Street is stark. Each weekend, there are long lines heading up Irving Street. More and more, a miasma of people swamp between Hook Fish Co. and Blackbird, bumping across the road. It's almost a testament to how popular this stretch of the neighborhood is these days. There's a yoga studio full of people, also in the middle of Garfield's least favorite seventh of the week. Another tipping point: the official christening of the Great Highway as Sunset Dunes in April 2025.
Owner Kathryn Graham is thoughtful and slow-going in her speaking. She says the first thing that let her know her cafe was getting traction was the olive oil spelt cake. The subtle pastry blew up on TikTok. Her friends and staff let her know. Then, the matcha hive showed up. Rocky's has more than 20,000 followers on TikTok, ground zero for the finely milled green tea powder's upsurge in attention. Blackbird's cafe manager had a run-in with the Rocky's team. That fateful encounter led to Blackbird as the sole outpost for Rocky's tea. Repeat customers now come every week for the tough-to-find Los Angeles matcha. Some trek from Potrero Hill and Bayshore to get a taste of that ceremonial grade good good. 'Rocky just connected with us on this vibe level,' Graham says. 'And we thought his matcha was so amazing. We did not realize he had this massive TikTok following and that those people would find us.'
Lauren Hanussak
The explosion in this Sunset shop's popularity overlaps with matcha's second great global renaissance in the 21st century. In San Francisco, that looks a lot like SoMa specialty cafe Telescope Coffee launching its own tinned ceremonial matcha. It looks a lot like Cafe Shoji's matcha einspänners spawning 40-minute waits. Unfortunately, it also looks like a global shortage is driving prices up for local players, including Le Dix-Sept. Per a report from Mizuba Tea, an importer with 12 years of buying from Japan, this shortage is a 'historic moment' that has seen the country go from a two percent slice of total tea export to a boom crop, causing field turnover as everyone scrambles to keep up.
Lauren Hanussak
Graham, with none of that on her radar, opened the original Blackbird on Judah Street in 2017, sans cafe attachment. She used to live in New York, where she worked with a group of activists to open the bookstore Blue Stockings. After the first election of Donald Trump, she wanted to work on a project like that again, a place for her two young kids and the Outer Sunset broadly. Three Fish Studio left its Irving Street location in 2022, and they reached out to Graham when they decamped. It was twice the size of her shop, and boasted a massive backyard space.
It was during that jump that she linked with the team at Four Barrel. There was no Day Moon bakery and cafe at that point, and Trouble Coffee's future was up in the air. She decided to turn part of her new shop into a cafe. In short order, people were coming and spending their whole days hanging out at Blackbird. There is a popular events arm in the space, too, harkening back to those Blue Stockings days. Open mic nights with more than 50 people, pop-ups including Malaysian pastry pop-up Batik and Baker, and children's reading hours are on almost every day.
Now with the advent of Sunset Dunes, this airy space full of books and caffeine gets more and more popular all the time. 'I create space, and people fill it,' Graham says. 'What makes it work here is very little to do with me.'
Lauren Hanussak
Eater SF
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