When Kevin Bohlin was scouting locations for Saint Frank, his first coffee shop, four years ago, colleagues told the former Ritual Roasters coffee educator that the Polk Street space he was eyeing was no good.

The same strip, they said, already had branches of Starbucks, Peet’s and a small chain called Royal Ground. Some told him the market was saturated. Others thought Starbucks fans would never respond to Bohlin’s coffees, sourced directly from farmers and roasted in minuscule batches.

Proving the doubters wrong, Saint Frank has been so successful that Bohlin opened a fourth cafe, in the South of Market, last week.

A new study commissioned by The Chronicle shows that San Franciscans support locally owned coffee shops like Saint Frank to a degree no other major city does.

The study, conducted by Hoodline, a San Francisco news site, analyzed listings on consumer ratings site Yelp. According to Hoodline, which compared data for 10 U.S. cities, only Seattle has a higher concentration of cafes: 8.5 coffee and tea shops per 10,000 residents, compared with San Francisco’s 8.4 per 10,000. Both figures are more than double those of larger cities such as New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago.

In addition, Hoodline found that only 24 percent of San Francisco coffee shops belonged to chains that have 12 locations or more — lower than any other city studied.

Since the 19th century foundings of Folgers and Hills Bros., San Francisco has been a coffee town. Cafe culture here has flourished since the 1950s, when Caffe Trieste opened in North Beach, arguably the first espresso bar on the West Coast.

Peet’s in Berkeley, which opened in 1966, was a major inspiration for national chains that came to prominence in the 1990s, such as Starbucks and Caribou, before Peet’s went national itself. In the early 2000s, Blue Bottle, Flying Goat and other Bay Area companies helped popularize the “third wave,” a nationwide movement away from milky lattes and cups of French roast dispensed from a spigot toward single-estate coffees prepared according to exacting standards.

The fact that almost a quarter of cafes in San Francisco belong to chains does not mean the city is hostile to corporate coffee. Starbucks, the world’s largest coffee chain, currently has 77 locations in the city. Included in that 24 percent are Bay Area companies Peet’s Coffee (36 San Francisco locations), Philz Coffee (13) and Blue Bottle (8).

Yet, as Bohlin put it, “San Francisco is a fiercely independent city in so many ways.”

Alexis Liu, owner of Beacon Coffee in North Beach, said San Franciscans prize the diversity of businesses the city has. “I think the average consumer in San Francisco is very savvy about where they want their consumables to come from.”

Chris Hillyard, who owns the 28-year-old Farley’s Coffee on Potrero Hill, echoed Liu. “We have a steady stream of customers,” he said. “They like the fact that we’re a neighborhood establishment and that we support the community through featuring local artists and nonprofits and hosting music, things of that nature that chains wouldn’t do.”

But San Francisco doesn’t just breed goodwill toward local entrepreneurs. City officials also enact policies that make it harder for chains to enter the market.

In 2004, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed a law to curtail the spread of “formula retail,” stores with 12 or more locations nationwide.

Some commercial districts, such as Hayes Valley, reject formula retail stores outright; many others require any such company to apply for a conditional-use permit, subject to neighborhood approval. The Financial District, Fisherman’s Wharf and several other districts are exempted. So are certain market sectors, such as grocery and real estate.

Bohlin discovered the depth of the city’s commitment to limiting formula retail when he started navigating city bureaucracy for his first location. “The amount of paperwork I had to fill out to verify I was not a chain was equal to the paperwork I had to fill out just to (incorporate as) a business,” he said.

Back to Gallery Why SF is fertile ground for homegrown coffee shops 5 1 of 5 Photo: Leah Millis, The Chronicle 2 of 5 Photo: Leah Millis, The Chronicle 3 of 5 Photo: Leah Millis, The Chronicle 4 of 5 Photo: Leah Millis, The Chronicle 5 of 5 Photo: Leah Millis, The Chronicle









Considering that 70 percent of conditional-use permits are approved, the fact that several San Francisco neighborhoods have mobilized to stop coffee chains from opening is a measure of the role of the local coffee shop in the city. In 2003, Hayes Valley activists rebuffed a proposed Starbucks location on Gough Street, a rejection repeated in the Castro in 2013.

Some San Franciscans turn on local coffee shops that grow into chains, such as Philz and Blue Bottle. This year, Lower Haight residents rejected Blue Bottle’s attempt to move into a space on Steiner Street — less than a mile from the Oakland company’s first kiosk, in Hayes Valley.

City support aside, running an independent coffee shop in San Francisco is far from easy. Cafe owners said they struggle with high rents, high wages and the city’s copious layers of bureaucracy, not to mention laptop-toting customers who buy a single cup of coffee and monopolize a table all day.

Yet interest in coffee here, as well as the density of independent cafes, appears to keep growing. Bohlin’s newest cafe, inside his year-old roastery, is only a few blocks from locations of Sightglass, Equator, Blue Bottle and Contraband, all Bay Area companies. Still, SoMa customers keep telling him they are thrilled Saint Frank has opened at Mission and Seventh streets because “there was nothing there.”

“San Franciscans want great coffee from a place they feel connected to — that’s also a block or less away from them,” he said.

Jonathan Kauffman is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jkauffman@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jonkauffman

