By Elena Kadvany
E-mail Elena Kadvany
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I am a perpetually hungry twenty-something journalist, born and raised in Menlo Park and currently working at the Palo Alto Weekly as education and youth staff writer. I graduated from USC with a major in Spanish and a minor in journalism. Though my first love is journalism, food is a close second. I am constantly on the lookout for new restaurants to try, building an ever-expanding "to eat" list. As a journalist, I'm always trolling news sources and social media websites with an eye for local food news, from restaurant openings and closings to emerging food trends. When I was a teenager growing up in Menlo Park, I always drove up to the city on weekends with the singular purpose of finding a better meal than I could at home. But in the past year or so, the Peninsula's food culture has been totally transformed, with many new restaurants opening and a continuous stream of San Francisco restaurants coming south to open Peninsula outposts. Don't navigate this food boom hungry and alone! Feed me your tips on new chefs and eats and together we'll share them with the broader community.
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Come this Friday, Palo Alto will be home to not one but two Blue Bottle Coffee cafes.
The Oakland-born string of cafes is opening its newest location at Stanford Shopping Center on Aug. 30. It will join Blue Bottle's
first-ever Peninsula cafe, which opened inside the historic Varsity Theatre in downtown Palo Alto in 2015.
The new cafe is located on the El Camino Real side of the shopping center, between clothing store Jeffrey and Labelle spa. Like other Blue Bottles, it will serve drip coffee and espresso drinks plus liège waffles, sandwiches and savory and sweet toasts for food.
Blue Bottle Coffee serves espresso drinks, pour-over and siphon coffee and New Orleans iced coffee. Beans are ground fresh for every drink. Photo by Magali Gauthier
The sleek, narrow space, designed by architectural firm Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, features a custom facade, skylights and folded vaults meant to evoke origami.
James Freeman started Blue Bottle more than a decade ago, before third-wave coffee was a thing, hand-roasting beans in a shed and delivering them to friends. The company now operates cafes in 10 cities in the United States, Japan and Korea.
The
Stanford Shopping Center Blue Bottle will be open daily from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m.
The cafe will hold a grand opening on Sept. 14; all sales that day will benefit San Francisco nonprofit Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture, or CUESA.