Blue Bottle's Ferry Building Location Getting Major Renovation/Expansion

You can always count on a crowd at the Ferry Building, but even by the bustling standards of the gourmet marketplace, Blue Bottle's Embarcadero outpost is the undisputed champion of lines. The ever-growing coffee chain is taking advantage of the tourist off-season to trim down waits with a new renovation and expansion, which will create three points instead of two to order coffee (two in the main arcade, and one at the cafe's "secret window" just around the corner). They'll also add a third espresso machine to get those lattes out faster, and a brew-by-scale coffee drip bar that will be the company's first in a Bay Area shop.

All this spiffing up means closures for renovations, though coffee fiends will have to go without entirely for only one day: this Friday, January 2. After that, the side window will be shuttered until January 30, while the main operation continues with business as usual. However, it'll just be coffee for the month of January, as the shutter will knock out production of affogatos, Liege waffles, sandwiches, and other non-pastry comestibles.

Once the window has had its turn for a revamp, it'll reopen on February 2nd, and the front entrance will go into renovation mode. The whole shebang is set to be open again in its new form by February 28, with fancy new cabinets and stainless steel countertops; from there on out, both sides of the shop will serve identical menus. And FiDi folks will soon have even more Blue Bottle in their lives, as the company is set to open new outposts on Sansome and in the Twitter building in 2015.