“We are local people with useful skills in tangible situations,” it says, among other things. Hanging in the door is a manifesto that covers a green chalkboard. The menu also features a go-for-broke option called “Build Your Own Damn House,” which consists of a coffee, a coconut, and a piece of cinnamon toast. (Carrelli tested this theory by living mainly on coconuts and grapefruit juice for three years, “unless someone took me out to dinner.”) And coconuts represent survival-because it’s possible, Carrelli says, to survive on coconuts provided you also have a source of vitamin C. Coffee represents speed and communication. The other main players on Trouble’s menu are coffee, young Thai coconuts served with a straw and a spoon for digging out the meat, and shots of fresh-squeezed grapefruit juice called “Yoko.” It’s a strange lineup, but each item has specific meaning to Carrelli. It is, for that nostalgic association, the first toast in San Francisco that really made sense to me. Trouble’s specialty is a thick slice of locally made white toast, generously covered with butter, cinnamon, and sugar: a variation on the cinnamon toast that everyone’s mom, including mine, seemed to make when I was a kid in the 1980s. Next to the cash register is a single steel toaster. And a glass refrigerator case beneath the cash register prominently displays a bunch of coconuts and grapefruit. A set of old speakers in the back blares a steady stream of punk and noise rock. One wall is decorated with a mishmash of artifacts-a walkie-talkie collection, a mannequin torso, some hand tools. The shop itself is about the size of a single-car garage, with an L-shaped bar made of heavily varnished driftwood. On my first visit on a chilly September afternoon, people were lounging on the trunk drinking their coffee and eating slices of toast, looking like lions draped over tree limbs in the Serengeti. Around the perimeter are benches and steps and railings made of salvaged wood, but no tables and chairs. Instead of a standard café patio, Trouble’s outdoor seating area is dominated by a substantial section of a tree trunk, stripped of its bark, lying on its side. How many weeks would it be, I wondered, before artisanal toast made it to Brooklyn, or Chicago, or Los Angeles? How long before an article appears in Slate telling people all across America that they’re making toast all wrong? How long before the backlash sets in? And second, despite myself, I felt a little thrill of discovery. How silly how twee how perfectly San Francisco, this toast. I had two reactions to this: First, of course, I rolled my eyes.
Why all the toast? “Tip of the hipster spear,” he said. Everywhere the offerings were more or less the same: thick slices of good bread, square-shaped, topped with things like small-batch almond butter or apricot marmalade or sea salt.īack at the Red Door one day, I asked the manager what was going on. There, between the two iPads that served as cash registers, was a small chalkboard that listed the day’s toast menu. Half of the shop’s food menu fell under the heading “Toast Bar.” Not long after that I was with my wife and daughter on Divisadero Street in San Francisco, and we went to The Mill, a big light-filled cafe and bakery with exposed rafters and polished concrete floors, like a rustic Apple Store. It tasted just like toast, but better.Ī couple of weeks later I was at a place called Acre Coffee in Petaluma, a smallish town about an hour north of San Francisco on Highway 101. It took me just a few seconds to digest what this meant: that toast, like the cupcake and the dill pickle before it, had been elevated to the artisanal plane.
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