An oat milk cappuccino from Deathless Coffee in San Francisco.
Deathless Coffee is the coolest Bay Area coffee pop-up you’ve never heard of.
It has no website, no publicly listed address and no menu. The only way to find it is through word of mouth, or if you happen to catch an Instagram story from owner Rai Littlejohn. You’ll then have to DM him for the location. It’s like a speakeasy, but instead of cocktails in a dark bar, there are oat milk lattes and vegan doughnuts served out of a shipping container in a Mission District alleyway twice a week.
“If you know, you know,” said Littlejohn, who’s been surreptitiously pulling espresso shots since 2020. As word spread, the outdoor coffee pop-up turned into a tight-knit community. Since its creation, customers have grown from Littlejohn’s friends to friends of friends and now to strangers who find their way to the pop-up. Many are bartenders, baristas, ex-baristas and artists.
On a recent afternoon, the patio in front of the small shipping container was filled with friends lingering over cortados and playing Connect Four at two picnic tables. Littlejohn is an avid cyclist, so fellow bikers flock here, too, their bikes leaning against nearly every available surface.
Mission figures like Grand Coffee founder Nabeel Silmi (Littlejohn uses his coffee beans) and clothing and graphic designer Benny Gold are regulars. Gold often stops by in the mornings after dropping his kids off at school. Notably, no one is typing on laptops or asking for the WiFi password. They’re there to socialize.
“I think that’s really important,” Silmi said. “In a lot of ways, coffee culture has become synonymous with working. With Deathless, it’s very intentional. It’s about coming and drinking coffee with other people and to build community around that.”
Deathless Coffee pops up inside a shipping container in the Mission District.
Visiting Deathless does feel a lot like stumbling onto a party you’re not cool enough to attend. But its covert nature wasn’t born out of exclusivity. Littlejohn couldn’t secure city permits to make his shipping container espresso bar dream legal. As a former bike messenger and barista making around $17 an hour, the traditional avenues of small business ownership felt onerous and out of reach. So he started serving coffee anyway. Many popular pandemic pop-ups got started this way, with out-of-work chefs selling Palestinian flatbreads, arepas and jerk chicken under the table.
Littlejohn doesn’t charge customers as a result. A glass tip jar is usually stuffed with cash, but it doesn’t cover the cost of the coffee beans, oat milk and his equipment. Once he outgrew a makeshift pour-over setup, he tapped into his savings to splurge on a bright blue La Marzocco espresso machine. He recently quit his barista job to focus on Deathless full time.
Littlejohn has also used the pop-up to highlight other self-starters. A talented baker-friend sometimes drops off vegan pastries, most recently a caramelized cross between Salvadoran pan dulce and a French canelé. A floral arrangement from Nine Swords Design, which sells foraged bouquets in San Francisco, is always set up in front of the espresso machine.
Deathless’ popularity is somewhat surprising given Littlejohn didn’t even drink coffee until four or five years ago. But once he did, it became a cherished ritual and he started working in coffee shops. He couldn’t, however, help but feel jaded by third wave cafes that often felt like exclusive, isolating spaces where questions about coffee weren’t welcome. He set out to create the opposite with Deathless Coffee. He’s not alone: The Bay Area has seen a wave of new coffee shops formed in response to an industry that’s long struggled with diversity and inclusion.
At Deathless, the traditional structures of a coffee shop are dissolved. There’s not really a line, just people hanging out and talking to an affable Littlejohn as he works. Customers wander behind the counter to help themselves to a pastry or peruse his CD and DVD collection.
“It’s very unique,” Silmi said. “I don’t think anyone’s doing anything like that right now.”
The grassroots feel is what makes the pop-up special, Silmi said. When photos of Deathless lattes started showing up on his Instagram feed, he reached out to Littlejohn to offer his support by providing free coffee beans. (Littlejohn now pays for them.) He started stopping by on Fridays when he can step away from his own coffee shop.
Littlejohn knows that running a coffee pop-up that makes no money while paying rent in San Francisco is unsustainable. But it’s paved the way to a new business: He’s opening an espresso bar inside a cycling apparel store opening in the Inner Richmond.
He hopes to be up and running by this summer, but plans to keep the Deathless pop-up going as long as possible. Even if it makes no money or gets shut down by the health department, he’s holding onto the feeling of building something special in San Francisco.
“I’m not getting paid at all but what I saw that it offered during the pandemic — this beautiful outdoor space where people can connect and feel human again,” he said, “that alone was worth the risk.”
Elena Kadvany is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: elena.kadvany@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @ekadvany
Elena Kadvany joined The San Francisco Chronicle as a food reporter in 2021. Previously, she was a staff writer at the Palo Alto Weekly and its sister publications, where she covered restaurants and education and also founded the Peninsula Foodist restaurant column and newsletter.