Ritual Coffee Roasters plans to open a café in October 2026 at the California-and-Battery corner, in a building that operated as a Starbucks for 20 years.
Ritual describes the building at the corner of California and Battery as having operated as a Starbucks for the past 20 years.
Ritual refers to the building as “255Cal” and places it at the corner of California and Battery.
A Planned New Café
Ritual was founded by Eileen Rinaldi in 2005, when she opened the company's first café in the Mission District. Ritual is associated with the Bay Area's third-wave coffee movement.
Rinaldi told the Chronicle she's glad to see more homegrown Bay Area coffee shops and restaurants opening downtown. “We really needed to have businesses that are representative of San Francisco downtown and that is finally happening now,” she said, per the same account.
Ritual's café inside San Francisco International Airport's Terminal 1 opened in October 2022.
What's on the Menu
The pour-over program includes V60 service and a Kalita setup for coffee built for two, a $11 offering the Chronicle lists alongside Ritual's standard pricing: macchiatos at $5.25, lattes at $8 and mochas at $8.50, the latter made with chocolate from Dandelion Chocolate in the Mission. Sprudge's build-out coverage describes the same pour-over bar, pairing it with a La Marzocco espresso machine and Ritual's focus on single-origin coffees and one seasonal espresso blend sourced from small-holder producers.
Ritual's announcement notes that Rinaldi managed Torrefazione Italia at the California-and-Battery corner before starting Ritual.
Downtown's Shifting Storefronts
Starbucks closed its location at 295 California Street.
Trade outlet Bizjournals.com frames the trend bluntly, reporting that Sextant Coffee and Ritual are expanding as chains retreat, with landlords offering lower rents and more flexible lease terms to attract independent operators. That shift, the outlet notes, is redefining ground-floor retail across the Financial District and the Yerba Buena area near Moscone Center.
The citywide numbers back up the momentum, even if plenty of challenges remain downtown. San Francisco's retail vacancy rate fell to 5.8% in the second quarter of 2026, down from 6.3% the prior quarter and 6.9% a year earlier, according to Cushman & Wakefield. Net retail absorption more than doubled quarter over quarter to 212,500 square feet, and Union Square pedestrian traffic climbed to 3.48 million visits in the same period.
Ritual has influenced San Francisco's coffee scene.
