Caffè Trieste – Vallejo Street at Grant Avenue, San Francisco, California

Caffè Trieste was opened in 1956 by Giovanni Giotta (aka "Papa Gianni"), who in 1951 had emigrated to the United States from the small fishing town of Rovigno in Istria (a region – now part of Croatia – that was part of Italy until after World War II). Missing the espresso houses of Trieste, Italy, Giotta opened his own cafe. Caffè Trieste is said to be the first espresso house on the West Coast.

The original Caffè Trieste in San Francisco’s North Beach quickly became popular among the neighborhood’s primarily Italian residents. "It was all Italian people," Giotta said of the neighborhood, "But I got the American people to like cappuccino." Papa Gianni Giotta is known as "The Espresso Pioneer," earning the label by having brought Espresso and Cappuccino to the West Coast, thus starting the Espresso Movement seen today.

The Caffè Trieste also becomes a convenient meeting place for Beat movement writers like Lawrence Ferlinghetti (still a regular), Alan Watts, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Richard Brautigan, Bob Kaufman, Gregory Corso, Michael McClure, Kenneth Rexroth and Neeli Cherkovski, who lived in North Beach in the 1950s and 1960s. Jack Hirschman, former Poet Laureate of San Francisco, has also been a regular patron. In addition to other writers and poets, painters such as Peter Le Blanc and Don Moses and photographers Joe Rosenthal ( a Pulitzer Prize Winner) and Jimo Perini, other celebrities counting themselves among the Trieste aficionados include Bill Cosby, Paul Kantner, Liam Mayclem, Joey Reynolds and Mal Sharpe, to name a few. In 1972, Francis Ford Coppola wrote much of the screenplay for The Godfather while sitting in the Caffè Trieste. The Caffè has been featured in several movies, on television, radio, in magazines, and in dozens of photography, tourism and other books, ranging from local to national and international in scope.