NEW NEIGHBORS | CHRIS BARNETT
It takes brass to open a coffee dispensary in the San Francisco these days. But cuppa joe impresario Aiden Compton has worked in the neighborhood for Peet’s, La Boulangerie and Starbucks, and is blood-related to a family-owned Brooklyn outfit called Variety Coffee. So he took over the tiny Samovar Tea shop at 1910 Fillmore earlier this year determined to bring back the old neighborhood feeling to the ’Mo.
Compton, at 36, has done just that with Compton’s Coffee House. The proprietor himself and his “strong right hand,” Heather Orell, personally pour the coffees (starting at $3) or whip up the lattes ($5) with a smile, and without the flamboyant chatter that sometimes ricochets off the walls of the chain operations.
After six months, Compton has a fan club.
“We like the coffee, but what we really like is to see the same familiar faces every time we come in,” says Courtney Chuang, a marketing executive who lives in the neighborhood. Compton points out that artist Dan Max, who has lived on the street for 50-plus years, comes in every morning for coffee. “That’s true,” boulevardier Max acknowledged. “I love the place, the staff, the people who drink there. I go back there for my afternoon coffee. Compton’s makes the best cappuccino on the street.”
Compton stuck with the Samovar’s colors and cozy-without-being-cramped spatial setup, but added some vintage cable car illustrations and paintings by local artists — including one by his mother, Lynn O’Brien — turning the coffee house into a small gallery.
Sipping a vanilla latte, Fillmore clinical psychologist Chelsea Siwik judged Compton’s as “very friendly” and praised it for “supporting locals.”
Both are among the reasons Aiden Compton opened the store in the first place. “I always had the idea of being an entrepreneur — my own boss,” he says. “I’ve been working in food service 18 years. I love its energy, waking up every day and saying ‘Okay, here we go again.’ ”
It might seem suicidal to challenge well-financed chains like the ones he once worked for that have multiple outlets nearby.
“I felt I had a responsibility to the community to create a place that’s inclusive, welcoming and friendly,” Compton says. “The chains are built on customer efficiency: ‘I need coffee. You’ve got coffee.’ It’s a transaction.”
What distinguishes a local coffee house like Compton’s from a link in a chain of coffee stores, he says, “is that we want to be personal. We want to know customers’ names, what they order when they walk in. We want to be people’s go-to for coffee.”
When he went looking for a storefront, “I wanted a place that had longtime San Franciscans in the neighborhood, plus young people moving in and becoming part of the neighborhood. We wanted locals, young professionals, people who want to connect, who feel a sense of ownership. And that’s what’s happening. My wife is expecting twins in October and every day people come in and ask, ‘How’s she feeling?’ even if they don’t buy anything. There’s that connection.”
Compton isn’t making connections only inside his front windows and the small square footage inside. He took over Samovar Tea Co.’s lease when Samovar went to an online business model during the pandemic, and says he never would have succeeded if not for Woodhouse Fish Co., the popular seafood restaurant next door. “Woodhouse let us use their nautical parklet during the day, and they took it back at night,” he says. “That saved us.”
“I want to see Fillmore return to its roots as an entrepreneurial and family retail shopping area,” Compton says. “We have a father-daughter bakery [the nearby Fillmore Bakeshop]. We have a family gelato shop [the Philmore Creamery, also nearby]. My family did a lot of the work here and my mother, a retired registered nurse, volunteers here at the cash register on Mondays. And I don’t think this entrepreneurial recycling is just limited to Fillmore. It can be San Francisco — the entire Bay Area.”
Still, Compton is a realist. “We’re not taking this opportunity lightly,” he says. “Peet’s and Starbucks may not be the greatest personal coffee experience of all time, but they have consistency and you know you’ll get the same drink and sandwich at the same speed everytime.”
But fiddle with a highly regarded brand and you can have instant problems, he says, speaking from first-hand experience. “I worked at La Boulangerie when it was a small local French bakery, and everything was baked fresh, and there were lines out the door. When Starbucks took it over, the value perception (of its baked goods) changed overnight.”
That’s another reason Compton wants to keep it real.
Filed under: Food, Drink & Lodging