When Eileen Rinaldi, originally hailing from New York, visited San Francisco for the first time as a six-year-old, her life changed forever. “I came here to visit my uncle during a summer after first grade and remembered being like, ‘Oh this is where I’m gonna live when I grow up,’” Rinaldi said, recalling the memory to me while sitting in her sunlit office at Ritual Coffee’s roastery. “How a six-year-old would know that, I don’t know,” she said, laughing. “I just knew that this was where my people were.”
I laughed alongside Rinaldi, half in bewilderment and half in wonder. At six, I would not have even dared to dream that I would be living half a world away in the States — I was born and raised in Jakarta, Indonesia — much less in a city as strange as SF. Yet Rinaldi has made a living by embracing her unwavering adoration of San Francisco. Ritual Coffee, which Rinaldi founded back in 2005, truly acts as her love note to the city.
Rinaldi’s fervent love is especially palpable when she begins talking about how she picked the location of her cafes. “When I think about whether I want to go somewhere for coffee,” Rinaldi said, “I ask myself, ‘Is this where I want to spend my meditative moments before my day gets crazy?’” According to Rinaldi, only Ritual’s Haight outpost at the intersection of Central and Haight will do. Coffee-shop frequenter Ria Sim (of @coffeecakescafe, so her opinion is to be trusted) absolutely adores the Haight location, saying the cafe is “quaint” and “charming.” When Rinaldi herself describes a perfect morning sitting outside, watching the fog lift over Buena Vista Park on one side, with beautifully painted Victorian houses on the other, her eyes light up with joy. “It’s so classically San Francisco,” she said, sighing happily as one would when speaking about a beloved.
Rinaldi moved to San Francisco after a stint in Seattle, then caffeine capital of the world. Rinaldi had a clear mission — to bring specialty coffee to the Bay — despite many people telling her San Francisco was not ready for good coffee. When Rinaldi opened Ritual’s first branch on Valencia Street in May 2005, it was a time when $3 for a cup of coffee was not the norm; nor could a 1,800-square-foot space be zoned as a coffee shop (Rinaldi eventually figured this out by zoning the cafe under fast food, the only option between cafe and restaurant back then). But the opening of Ritual’s first cafe marked the beginning of a third-wave coffee movement in SF, especially with Blue Bottle opening its Hayes Valley kiosk that same year. It seemed only fitting that graphic designer Aimee Kilmer of Good Stuff Partners designed a logo signaling the revolution Ritual had started — a bright, bold red cup and star that was practically political in its nod to the hammer and sickle displayed on a waving flag. “[Aimee] told me, ‘You’re creating a new culture around good coffee, so you definitely need a flag to represent you,’” Rinaldi said.
Ashley Rodriguez, cohost of the Boss Barista podcast, believes that Ritual Coffee has truly “inspired a generation of coffee professionals” in Northern California, seeing that many notable coffee professionals worked for Ritual at some point before starting their own coffee companies. Rinaldi takes pride in this. Aspiring baristas come from all over the world to learn from Ritual, including Ritual Valencia’s manager, Christy Greenwald. “From the flag and the color, Ritual clearly stood for something specific,” Greenwald said. “I didn’t know anything about coffee, so I wanted one where I could learn from, so I got a job as a barista [at Ritual].”
Greenwald initially thought her job as a barista would be temporary, but seeing the way Rinaldi prioritizes Ritual’s relationships with their coffee farmers over the years made her stay in the coffee industry. This was something Rinaldi immediately emphasized as well upon my arrival at Ritual’s roastery. Taking me straight to see Ritual’s green, unroasted coffee beans still sitting in the sacks, Rinaldi joked that she’s even “been buying coffee from some of our producer partners longer than [she’s] known [her] husband.” To put a face behind the beans, six selected Ritual employees also get to travel to one of Ritual’s coffee farms overseas every year (the trip is appropriately named “Baristas in Paradise”). It was a turning point for Greenwald to go on the company’s trip to El Salvador. “I made personal connections with the farmers, ate coffee cherries, saw the farm — it was amazing,” she said.
One can see how Ritual values their coffee farmers just by picking up a bag of their roasted coffee beans to bring home — illustrations of Ritual’s coffee farmers brand the side of bags I’ve brought home before. What I did not know was that stories of each farmer are hidden inside each label. “It’s good to have some stuff to be hidden and have people discover it, huh?” Rinaldi chuckled and said upon my oohing and aahing when she showed me this secret in Ritual’s packaging. “There can be an even greater appreciation for coffee this way.”
But the coffee-farmer bios are perhaps the only pieces of information relatively “hidden.” The kind of transparency Ritual provides regarding its coffee supply also extends to transparency within the company, according to Greenwald. “You wanna know something, you ask, and you’re given information [at Ritual],” she said. “Beyond that, we’re just given information without asking, which has always just made [working at Ritual] feel safe, welcoming and fun.” As an outsider, Rodriguez remarked similarly about Ritual, attesting that Rinaldi is “super-accessible.” Rodriguez found it very easy to reach out to Rinaldi when writing an article for Barista Magazine back in 2015—something I can personally vouch for as well.
I do not casually mention these observations of Ritual’s transparent corporate culture, for they come at an especially relevant time. In case you missed it, Jeremy Tooker of Four Barrel Coffee just went through a discrimination lawsuit based on allegations of sexually assaulting eight employees and creating a toxic, sexist workplace culture. The allegations came out just a few days prior to our interview, and I wondered how to ask Rinaldi about her thoughts about it. After all, Tooker was her business partner before he left to start Four Barrel. Yet I hesitated; I did not want one man’s mistakes to overshadow this woman’s success. To be around in a constantly changing city for 13 years is no small feat.
But Rinaldi delved into the matter right away, without my having to ask for it. “[Ritual is] a really diverse group of people, and we work really hard to be inclusive,” she said at the beginning of our conversation. We chatted more about her hiring process — “they need to love coffee” and, at the management level, be “committed to the idea of San Francisco and see a future here” — before returning to the subject of company culture, which Rinaldi subtly acknowledges as “a fresh topic of discussion around here.” She credited being a female business owner as a major factor behind the success of Ritual’s culture. “I don’t know whether I would have placed such an importance on Ritual being an inclusive environment if I were a man,” she said. “It’s been very important to me that we have women in leadership positions here, in addition to other marginalized groups as well.”
Sho Young, Ritual’s coffee educator, joined Ritual at a time when he was “so fed up with the industry [he] had committed to abandoning it entirely.” At his last coffee job, Young encountered an unhealthy working environment, and said that “the culture was not something [he] felt like a part of,” due to his inability to speak up within the company. “In more male dominated companies, I’ve noticed that ego speaks much louder,” Young commented. Meanwhile, at Ritual, the opposite holds true. Young remarked that “ego doesn’t get you anywhere here, and you are considered based on your merits.” It is the reason why he sees not only more women in leadership roles, but also more opportunities for women who want to move up at Ritual. After a year at Ritual, Young truly sees the company as “a leader in the industry when it comes to equal opportunity as well as being a safe haven for the marginalized.”
As our conversation drew to an end, I asked Rinaldi what she wants to accomplish next with Ritual, now that it is practically a “teenager.” Let’s take stock for a minute: in 2007, Ritual designed a postcard with the words, “San Francisco ain’t known for good coffee…yet.” In 2010, upon celebrating Ritual’s fifth anniversary, Rinaldi saw that its own forecast had come true: they were now in good company with other third-wave artisanal coffee companies like Sightglass, Four Barrel and Verve. Today, Rinaldi takes pride in the fact that “San Francisco is the best city for coffee in the entire world — [we are] far surpass[ing] Seattle and Portland, and New York [is] years behind what we’re doing here.”
I asked her whether she has any desire to expand Ritual nationwide. Rinaldi adamantly answered, “I’m not going to do the kind of growth like some of the companies I’ve seen do, opening 10 cafes in a year.” Almost immediately, I thought about the difference in my own parents’ business styles. Both entrepreneurs in their own right — my father always expanding as quickly as he can, while my mother carefully planning and plotting her next move — they have both found success and satisfaction. And as I realized later, not that unlike Blue Bottle and Ritual either: two San Francisco–based third-wave coffee companies starting around the same time but having had two completely different growth trajectories. What a difference it is to be a woman-owned company, I mused. Rinaldi has set her goals beyond just a franchise; she wants Ritual to be a “legacy business” in San Francisco, somewhere in between Swan Oyster Depot and Levi’s. “I make decisions in the long run, of how can we be here in 20, 30, 40 years,” Rinaldi said. “I’m not going to be at the helm of the company forever, but how do I set it up so I can pass it along?”
A significant change, for instance, was Ritual Valencia’s remodeling in 2015. While many a Yelp reviewer called it “soulless” and “sterile,” Greenwald saw it as necessary and described the lighter aesthetic as pairing well with the recent infusion of tech culture in SF. “A lot of people are really upset about that, but being at Ritual, it never felt bad to me,” she said. “We had an influx of people not having any idea about specialty coffee, and it’s been really cool to embrace the people who are new to the neighborhood and want to make us part of their daily routine.” Sim, for instance, discovered Ritual when she first moved to SF four years ago and became an “instant fan” of Ritual’s baristas’ welcoming nature. “For people new to the coffee world, it can be pretty intimidating, especially with what’s being offered in coffee shops these days,” she said. “[Ritual’s] awesome, friendly staff helps to ease that feeling of, ‘What do I order?’”
Because at the end of the day, coffee shops are where many a transient Millennial goes to find some semblance of a welcome refuge.And in these coffee shops designed to exhibit Rinaldi’s love of San Francisco, slowly I started to uncover how the city is not as strange as it is quirky, an intimate kind of weirdness. “I do really love San Francisco, and I think San Francisco is a powerful idea,” Rinaldi reiterated again and again in our conversation. “It’s a place where people come to find their chosen family, to find people who share their values.” And Rinaldi has certainly done that — by attracting a community of passionate coffee lovers who share her strong principles, she and her Ritual family are building the business that is here to stay, here in her beloved City by the Bay.
