Rebecca Solnit's Infinite City is an attempt to map San Francisco in terms that are not strictly geographical. Just as Burrito Justice once pictures the city as a system of canals and islands, so this atlas is a book of articles and, most strikingly, maps that portray that city as various terrains, some real and some dreamscape, from the gangland to the phrenological. One of the maps happens to be of San Francisco as home to a tribe of coffee shops, clustered in a heart from the Mission outward. Of the score of java emporia, only Tartine seems to have been snotty enough to identify itself as coffee shop plus something else, although if you've tasted their baked goods can you blame them (it's also possible this feature was added by the cartographer). The fact that this map may already be out of date, since Ritual has fired another salvo in the hipster wars by opening a branch half a block from Blue Bottle, is further testament to the place that coffee holds in our urban psyche.
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