Exporting Fillmore’s coffee culture

By Anne Paprocki

Tucked in an unassuming office behind two Fillmore boutiques, longtime local residents Elise Papazian and Scott Pritikin hope to expand the horizons of coffee connoisseurs everywhere with their recently launched online service GoCoffeeGo.

“Nobody should be drinking the same cup of coffee every day,” says Papazian, “It’s just boring. Would you eat the same food day in and out?”

The website includes a selection of coffee beans from 18 different roasters, including Zoka, Ritual, Cuvee, Atomic, Equator Coffees & Teas and Johnson Brothers. Papazian and Pritikin — who admit to testing up to 10 different coffees a day — have vetted each offering.

Checking out of the checkout line

Photograph of Allen Brandstein by Kathi O'Leary

After more than two decades of offering up good cheer and wry observations while ringing up groceries and restocking the shelves, Allen Brandstein has retired from Mollie Stone’s. His last day was March 31.

Stoking his decision to leave were two life passages: a bout with colon cancer last year and his first Social Security check, which he received a few weeks ago after turning 62.

“Those things give you an immediate dose of perspective that life is finite,” he says.

Celebrating 70 years together

The couple operated Stewart's Market at 2498 Sutter.

A taste of the old Fillmore will be on display today at a special celebration being held at Jones Memorial United Methodist Church honoring local residents Norman and Mable Stewart on their 70th anniversary.

“We are so proud of their accomplishments in business and marriage and we want to share it with everyone,” says granddaughter Anassa “Kandee” Stewart, who helped organize a lunch to honor the couple after the Sunday morning service at Jones Memorial. The Stewarts have been members of the church for more than 55 years.

They were married in 1940 in Texarkana, Arkansas, where they ran a grocery, cafe and service station. After they moved to San Francisco, they owned and operated a neighborhood market for more than 30 years. Although they retired in 1976, Stewart’s Market at 2498 Sutter Street still bears their name.

A news project: reinvent journalism

Q & A | ROSE ROLL

R ose Roll, a local resident and occasional contributor to the New Fillmore, is involved in creating the Bay Area News Project — a new nonprofit venture funded by neighborhood philanthropist Warren Hellman that is being heralded by some as a reinvention of journalism.

With The New York Times signing on as a partner, momentum seems to be building for the Bay Area News Project. Can you describe what it is in a nutshell?

The Bay Area News Project is a nonprofit, nonpartisan publicly supported news organization. Our mission is to stimulate innovation in journalism, foster civic engagement and fill the gaps in reporting Bay Area civic news at a time when newspapers have had to make severe cuts in their coverage for economic reasons. We’re just getting started, but in time our professional newsroom will generate original, in-depth coverage of Bay Area topics including government and public policy, the arts and cultural affairs, education and the environment, as well as neighborhood news and events. Our primary channel will be online and mobile, but we expect also distribute our news through print (via The New York Times), radio and television. Our goal is to launch in late spring of this year.

To Haiti on a medical mission

Dr. Eduardo P. Dolhun

Neighborhood physician Dr. Eduardo P. Dolhun is with a team of doctors in Haiti treating earthquake victims. Here is a portion of his first dispatch from the front:

“Within a matter of minutes we were presented with a wide assortment of severe illnesses, all of them traumatic and now nearly six days old.

“The first patient was a 78-year-old woman who had gotten her hand crushed by a fallen concrete slab in her kitchen. She was preparing dinner for her children and grandchildren. She was calm and patient, as we slowly removed the gauze that had not been changed for five days. The dried blood and puss had fused the dressing in a patchy assortment of wet and dry areas, with bubbles percolating up from the wet areas, indicating anaerobic bacterial (bacteria that cause gangrene) infection. One is able to diagnose this type of infection with the nose: It has a distinctive and unforgettable odor.

“As we methodically unwrapped and gently cut away the bandage, we had time to get to know her and also to prepare her for the probability that she would likely lose the entire hand, adding to the loss of her five fingers.”

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The artistic inkeepers

Bill and Denise Shields

Story and photographs
by Carina Woudenberg

Half a block up Pine Street from Fillmore, behind a perfectly maintained white picket fence, stands the Artists Inn.

A flag flies in the breeze, but there is no sign of what lies behind the pale blue and white facade: three former art studios that a decade ago were transformed into a charming bed and breakfast.

“Never did it cross our minds we’d run a B&B,” says the inn’s co-owner and co-proprietor Denise Shields. She and her husband, the respected artist Bill Shields, bought the house in the mid-70s when it desperately needed their love and care — and a major remodel.

The end of a design era

Every year, his clients have been invited to tour designer John Wheatman's home.

By Thomas Reynolds

In the springtime came the annual invitation to stop by the corner of Alta Plaza Park and tour the elegant home of interior designer John Wheatman.

Hundreds of current and former clients walked through on May 3, a cool, grey Sunday afternoon, to admire the treasures Wheatman has acquired and the good taste with which he has arranged them — and his garden, looking splendid in the mist, and grown entirely in pots and planters on the rooftop.

So it was a surprise when his letter of September 30 arrived. “I have decided to retire,” he wrote. “I have loved every minute of my involvement with you.” And in merely a month the end has come, after 45 years, for John Wheatman & Associates.

One tequila, two tequila, three tequila, floor!

Joanne Weir: Women love tequila, too.

By Joanne Weir

It all started several years ago when an invitation arrived in my mailbox on Pine Street beckoning me to the launch of a spiffy new tequila in a sexy square bottle.

It took place at Tommy’s, the well-known tequila bar out on Geary, and was mostly men who were sniffing and swirling their glasses of tequila. But the few women who were there were just as enthusiastic.

I discovered that night that women love tequila just as much as men. They go out with their girlfriends for margaritas, and they also savor tequila straight-up with meals, drink it slowly from a snifter and enjoy it mixed into new, innovative, seasonal cocktails. I was thrilled by the camaraderie among these women and pleased to learn that I wasn’t the only one out there who liked a beverage that had long been considered the domain of men.

A lifetime of loving film

Global but local: film critic David Thomson on Fillmore. Photograph by Lucy Gray.

“What should I see?”

It’s the question the eminent film critic and historian David Thomson is asked most often — sometimes even as he walks his dog in Alta Plaza Park or runs errands on Fillmore Street.

Now, more than three decades after he published his landmark Biographical Dictionary of Film, Thomson has responded to the question comprehensively in a new book published in October 2008 titled Have You Seen…? Its subtitle bills it as “A personal introduction to 1,000 films, including masterpieces, oddities, guilty pleasures and classics (with just a few disasters).”

A merry band of Food Runners

Photograph of Mary Risley by Lucy Gray

By Marjorie Leet Ford

Like Robin Hood and his band of merry men, Mary Risley and her crew of Food Runners take from those who have too much and give to those who don’t have enough.

It all started when she realized she had a problem at Tante Marie, her cooking school: Her student chefs couldn’t eat as much as they cooked. Tante Marie had too much food — really good food — while people all over San Francisco went hungry.

One day Risley found herself with five wedding cakes. She took them to Glide Memorial Church, and Rev. Cecil Williams nearly fainted. Another Sunday she took him seven boned ducks stuffed with veal pate.

Then she got the idea for Food Runners.