Mokhtar Alkhanshali and David Eggers are titans within their respective fields. Alkhanshali in the specialty coffee industry, where he is one of the leading voices in the reemergence of Yemeni coffee, and Eggers an award-winning novelist. The San Franciscans previously worked together for The Monk of Mokha, Eggers’s book about Alkhanshali.
And the duo are working together once again. This time for a cafe and art space called Art + Water.
First reported by Eater San Francisco, the massive new 70,000-square-foot space is located at Pier 29 just of The Embarcadero, near the Fisherman’s Wharf neighborhood of San Francisco. The arts nonprofit will offer free studio space for artists and have a 10,000-square-foot gallery.
Alkhanshali will be handling the coffee side of things, but not under his Port of Mokha. Instead, it will be an as-yet named new coffee brand that he is calling “the first luxury coffee company.” There is little information as to what exactly that will amount to, but Alkhanshali tells Eater that drinks will be accompanied by food similar to “high tea time or omakase-style service.” The cafe is drawing inspiration from 18th and 19th century coffee houses in global cities like Sana’a and Cairo, even Boston.
“[Eggers] noticed there was no coffee in that entire area,” Alkhanshali says. “He could have had 1,000 people open a cafe there. But what he wants to build, it’s going to be its own world.”
The expected opening date for Art + Water, as of now, is sometime in the summer or fall of next year.
For more information about Art + Water, read Eggers’s article in McSweeney’s explaining its conceit.
Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.
