How South Asians Leveled Up the Bay’s Coffee World

South Asian coffee culture is having its hero moment throughout the Bay Area.

A long line snakes through the second floor of San Francisco’s Main Library at 9 p.m. It’s strange; it’s a library, after all. But that doesn’t seem to matter as customers sidle into the queue for Anand Upender’s subtle, well-made cardamom lattes, milk-washed teas, or one of a litany of other “bastardized Indian grandma” drinks, as he calls them.

Upender’s coffee pop-up York Street Cafe has joined Roaming Bean Coffee for the Night of Ideas, a free, nationwide series of panels and conversations on a range of topics. York Street Cafe’s drinks are attractive, aromatic, and always precisely executed to Upender’s vision — to showcase the breadth of Indian flavors and culture through coffee. He’s grateful that his parents allowed him “to break out of the traditional ‘lawyer, engineer, doctor’ mold,” a dynamic experienced by many in his generation. “To move into a field like coffee is kind of nuts.”

Upender isn’t alone in his mission to explore coffee culture through a South Asian lens. In fact, he’s part of a cohort of South Asian coffee, tea, and beverage stewards in the Bay Area; they’re like the Avengers, maintaining a WhatsApp group where they discuss ideas and upcoming pop-ups, and organize events like these, where one entrepreneur showcases the beans of another before someone else’s pop-up takes place the following week.

The group is part of a broader movement that’s seeing South Asian and Indian beverage businesses sprout up all over the world. In the United Kingdom, there’s Chaiiwala, a chai cafe chain with a dizzying number of locations, and in New York, there’s the popular Kolkata Chai Co., referring to the capital of the Indian state of West Bengal and known for reclaiming the chai trend for the next generation Indian Americans (and for being a favorite of Northern California-born Indian American comedian Hasan Minhaj). The late chef Floyd Cardoz and wife entrepreneur Barkha Cardoz even launched the Cardoz Legacy Collection, bringing loose-leaf masala chai to the masses through Los Angeles’s Art of Tea.

In the Bay, the Indian beverage scene remains grassroots, more tight-knit like a hip-hop collective than an organized campaign. Upender contends that Indian coffee culture is on the cusp of a popularity boom, not unlike what San Francisco’s Boba Guys started before taking Taiwanese tea all over the country. There are inroads for Indian beverages to hit the mainstream — look at not only chai and its second wave but also the popularity of the turmeric latte. In both cases, however, the beverages’ propagation has been driven largely by non-South Asians. It’s significant then, when an Indian American makes an Americano with Kalledevarapuran-grown beans — since, until the last few years, that process almost always left South Asians on the sidelines.

Because of the robust and grassroots scene bourgeoning in the region, it’s fair to say the Bay Area is the South Asian coffee capital of the United States.

Upender’s drinks arrive topped with inventive garnishes and decorations.

Ruby Chocolate is grated over a drink at York Street Cafe

India’s long history of coffee drinking started in 1670. While on hajj, the Sufi religious pilgrim Baba Budan encountered the energizing drink. As the story goes, he stuffed seven coffee beans from the Port of Mocha in what’s now Yemen into his beard to smuggle them into India. Upon returning home, he cast the beans on the hills of his hometown in the southern Indian state of Karnataka, establishing the region’s first coffee plants. Visitors can find a shrine built in his honor in nearby Chikkamagaluru, where coffee enthusiasts also visit his tomb.

Beginning in the 1930s, Indian coffee houses became popular throughout the south, with institutions like the India Coffee House sprouting outposts in Mysore, Chennai, and beyond.

That blend of myth, history, and geography on the subcontinent makes up the backdrop to modern Indian coffee culture. In the south it’s now commonplace to drink coffee, though tea remains the most common caffeinated drink in India. Masala chai is the working man’s drink, says Christopher Chekuri, a professor of history and coordinator of the South Asian studies minor at San Francisco State University. He says tea maintains continued dominance while the region’s coffee crop remains primarily a commodity export, usually reserved for upper-class consumers.

In South India, peaberry coffee, a high caffeine-content mutation of the coffee bean, is common and blended with chicory to achieve a darker, richer spice profile.

Modern South Indian coffee regions — home to numerous coffee farms and plantations — are also popular travel destinations for well-heeled Indians, says Chekuri, comparing the hillside hiking through tiger reserves of India to how a Silicon Valley billionaire might head to a Lake Tahoe resort for the long weekend. Now, some of that enthusiasm for coffee has spread to the Bay, thanks to the numerous South Indians who’ve immigrated to the area as they find white-collar employment in the United States. Indian-born residents are the largest immigrant population in Santa Clara and Alameda counties, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. So, while the most famous story of Indian coffee might be that of Baba Budan, the Bay Area’s scrappy team of South Asian coffee Avengers is bringing greater awareness to the beverage’s modern culture.

Jasraj Singh Sangha of Roaming Bean Coffee is a big-time social butterfly.

Jasraj Singh Sangha might be the Thor of the Bay Area’s South Asian beverage collective, chatty and friendly with a sturdy frame and mighty beard. This robust expansion of South Asian coffee and tea culture in the Bay Area comes from first- and second-generation immigrants combining the region’s commitment to high-quality ingredients with a sheer love of the game. So it makes sense that Sangha fills the role of standard-bearer on the experiential side of things. His coffee cart business Roaming Bean Coffee is all about hospitality, evoking the coffee stands of his birthplace in the North Indian state of Punjab. Sangha says that in Punjab he could always rely on someone taking him in for tea and conversation. “We talk for five minutes for each coffee sold,” Sangha says, laughing.

The idea of bringing Punjabi coffee culture to the States started to percolate between him and his brother five years ago while they were living in Seattle. They taught themselves, and their dad, espresso skills by watching YouTube videos. They shed their desk jobs along the way, and the former IT worker and his family set up their espresso machine at the Berkeley Marina in summer 2023. Now weekly walking groups build their routines around Roaming Bean, something for which he’s grateful and says shows the infectious energy South Asians share over a hot cup. Coffee is new to him and his family, as Punjab, like India as a whole, is home mostly to tea drinkers, but linking with other South Asians in the scene has vaulted him ahead. Coffee is a new point of origin for those in the community overseas, Sangha says.

Tanya Rao of Kaveri Coffee Works

Tanya Rao, founder of Kaveri Coffee Works, agrees. She’s a third-generation Indian coffee roaster living in the East Bay. She imports beans grown in India, showcasing widely palatable blends with her Bold roast while demonstrating the cerebral heights Indian-grown beans can attain through rotating microlots from producers like Madhu Agro Plantation in the Eastern Ghat mountains.

She grew up in Karnataka — the same state to which Baba Budan brought those famous beans — and where 70 percent of the coffee in India is produced. The state’s capital, Bengaluru — often labeled as the Silicon Valley of India — is itself considered one of the coffee capitals of the country. There, her grandfather and father ran a coffee company, but Rao knew she would never be the one to take over the family company — not due to a lack of passion but because of India’s patriarchal business practices. Instead, she came to the U.S. in the late ’90s to pursue her bachelor’s degree. Once she moved to San Francisco, she hung out at the Blue Bottle garage shop and Ritual location on Valencia Street, finding those memories of home swirling in the dark aroma of freshly brewed coffee. “I noticed people highlighted origins and origin stories,” Rao says. “But India was never showcased or even mentioned.”

But even as coffee is the main character in the Bay’s Indian beverage scene, masala chai remains a central player. At Elaichi Co., located steps from the UC Berkeley campus, one can find piping hot, just-poured chai blooming with aromatic black pepper and cardamom. There’s also a full espresso menu and rotating pop-ups highlighting more of the Bay’s South Asian collaborators, such as Nani Khatai shortbread cookies and Babo’s Concept Kitchen’s granola, which is made with lotus seeds, lentils, and coconut. Rao also pops up at Elaichi (which means “cardamom”) to present kaapi or South Indian filter coffee. Like Turkish coffee, super fine ground coffee is brewed into a decoction and then mixed with sugar, milk, and, sometimes, chicory.

Elaichi’s husband-and-wife owners Muhammad “Mojo” and Zainab Joyo think of their company as a celebration of Pakistani drinks and culture alongside their support of these other South Asian pop-up owners. “Living here, there is this longing,” Mojo says. “Your culture, your roots, your family. And there’s this drive not to lose it.”

Just like Rao, the couple represents a community of Bay Area South Asians who find themselves longing for home. Rao visited Bengaluru in 2022 and says the country is experiencing what she calls the peak of the third wave, an unabashed love of coffee nerdery. That’s when she started working with Indian engineers to bring the once-again-trendy kaapi to the states, following in the footsteps of entrepreneurs like mega popular barista Nick Cho, who brought the Japanese Kalita Wave dripper to the States in 2010, or the Yemeni dallahs popularized again in part by Haraz Coffee and shops like it. “This is the age of cultural pride,” Rao says.

Muhammad “Mojo” Joyo pours chai with the best of them.

Big groups gather at Elaichi, and have since day one.

Sporting a headband and Coke bottle glasses, Anand Upender says young people sometimes reach out to him out of the blue to ask how he got started making experimental South Asian coffees. Many Indian Americans are groomed for white-collar careers, he says, so he tends to stick out. Despite the structural inequities of the restaurant industry as a whole — and the pervasiveness of the model minority myth — it’s a fair point: Silicon Valley often aims to hire Indian tech workers looking for paths to citizenship.

In fact, he and most of the other power players in the South Asian coffee scene either still have full-time jobs or only recently left them. Even explaining pop-ups or specialty coffee to his family is challenging; he’s pretty sure his grandma thinks he serves instant coffee foamed with milk. No matter, as his commitment is unwavering. “The timing is ripe right now for young people to start creative businesses, South Asians in particular,” Upender says.

His specialty is far from instant coffee. Upender’s drinks at York Street riff on recipes from his family, such as his grandma’s lemongrass and pepper-forward chai, which leaves out the sugar that many Americans expect. His family hails from both the northern and southern parts of India, his mom from Gujarat and his dad from Hyderabad in Telangana. Upender’s grandparents immigrated to the United States for education, and Upender’s parents, while born in India, did all their schooling on the East Coast of the United States. Entrepreneurship runs in his veins, as his Gujarati grandma started a Bollywood dress doll company, a tailoring business, and a child care business in the States.

And the South Asian coffee movement extends beyond just this collective, too. Daly City’s Yeti Tea blends boba and Nepalese-style teas, an example of further integration of subcontinental flavors in Bay Area drinks. Chekuri points out that coffee houses are becoming more popular in India, too. Now they’re places where guests might order one drink with numerous cups to share with friends, something considered positive and inviting in India’s Deccan Plateau.

That’s all good news to Upender, who says that in some ways, it’s about having the brown hands populate posh coffee bars as much as they do fields on farms. Now those hands are sending flurries of WhatsApp messages, hurrying to clap for a colleague’s newest pepper-laden drink. “I don’t know,” Upender says, searching for the words. “It’s a cultural movement.”

The family behind Roaming Bean are now familiar faces on the Berkeley shoreline.