In the meantime, Starbucks under Schultz mutated into an operation of 2,000-plus stores. To San Franciscans, the coffee-as-image attitude is evidence that Seattleites aren’t as discriminating about good coffee as they are.
In San Francisco proper, Starbucks has 67 stores to Peet’s 10 and local chain Martha & Brothers’ five, and all 67 seem to be thriving.
So what does the way Seattle obsesses about good coffee and the way the Bay Area takes it for granted say about those two places?

To quote Baldwin: “It’s a question of experience and maturity, if you put it into human terms, the younger athlete, let’s say, is much more aggressive about asserting himself because he has something to prove. In the ’70s, there were just a handful of decent restaurants in Seattle, and no one came to Seattle to eat or shop or see what was going on, the way they came to San Francisco. Seattle today has nothing to apologize for in terms of good restaurants or good hotels or architecture or any one of a dozen attributes. But it still doesn’t have the generations of confidence that San Francisco has.”

America owes a great debt to both towns for forcing coffee vendors all over to serve a better cup of joe. And it isnt news that the most famous coffee shop in the world is Starbucks.
But there is still room for improvement everywhere, according to Baldwin. “Instead of Seattle and San Francisco duking it out for head of the coffee culture,” he says, “let’s rejoice that the coffee around both places is a hell of a lot better than it is in nearly all the rest of the country.”

Seattle, San Francisco. These two jewels of U.S Pacific Coast have much in common: a reputation as the coffee lover’s Nirvana. So who is the real pro?
Though the cities’ caffeine societies are distinct, their pasts are intertwined. San Francisco has a tradition of good coffee that goes back at least as far as the 1899 opening of Freed, Teller & Freed, the oldest specialty bean roaster west of New York.

Peet was Dutchman Alfred Peet’s modest little roastery, opened in 1966 on Walnut and Vine in Berkeley, that became the real epicenter of the gourmet coffee boom that has engulfed the Bay Area, Seattle, and, mercifully, many former Maxwell House strongholds beyond.

It may be purely coincidental that many of San Francisco’s independent coffeehouses have a similarly well-worn, unhi-tech atmosphere. But it is no accident that the first Starbucks, located at 1912 Pike Place in Seattle (the very first was actually half a block north, in a building that has since been torn down), looks and feels an awful lot like the first Peet’s.

Starbucks founders Jerry Baldwin, Zev Siegl, and Gordon Bowker spent the 1970 Christmas season at Peet’s learning from the master before starting their own coffee bean business in Seattle in 1971. They used Peet’s beans for the first 21 months.

Seattle’s coffee scene used to be as dreary as its weather. By 1984, , Baldwin and Bowker bought Peet’s, and in 1987, they sold Starbucks to a group led by Howard Schultz, the company’s former marketing director. Since then, Bowker has moved on and Baldwin has grown Peet’s into a 60-store company that still maintains uncompromising bean selection and roasting standards.