This San Francisco cafe has turned into a tech worker’s ‘Zombieland’

But physically it is something else.

Like a scene from HBO’s “Silicon Valley,” Café Reveille’s Steiner Street location in Lower Haight has been transformed into a workspace for Bay Area tech, founders and industry disruptors. Concerned San Francisco residents say it’s impossible to sit quietly without being interrupted by the grilling of people holding back-to-back zoom conferences and virtual job interviews.

On a quick visit to the cafe on Wednesday afternoon, I was immediately confronted by a sea of ​​laptops attached to the bodies of their users. The weather was so hot and hazy, it reminded me of a sold out concert venue or a university library. I skipped lunch and started having iced coffee instead.

As soon as I sat down, a guy in a tight little sweater sighed and took a conference call next to me.

He said something silly to his colleagues about the job monitoring situation. I tried to tune him out, but a kid in a radioactive green beanie and Air Force One started broadcasting the conversation on speaker phone. In brutally perfect timing, Forlorn’s saxophone begins wailing over the sound system. How one can socialize, let alone concentrate, is beyond me here.

Angry and finally online San Francisco residents have a lot to say about it. “I used to enjoy it, but now it’s a zoo,” wrote one person on Nextdoor, adding that she was born and raised in the city.

“It’s disgusting,” she continued. “Not WeWork people!”

After finding her seemingly deleted posts, I called this resident and asked her about the change in the cafe. (She has been asked to remain anonymous under Hearst’s ethics policy because she works in tech herself.) The cafe is filled with remote workers and feels like “zombieland,” she said.

“You lose that sense of connection,” she told me, when she’s called constant booster meetings “unroyal” and clueless in the community. When people stare at their screens all day, she “destroys those opportunities for calm.” (Additionally, after multiple thefts at the Lower Haight Reveille in mid-2021, some employees allegedly chained their laptops to desks, although this was nowhere to be seen during my visit).

Cafes have always been places where people work – but the Bay Area carries a unique burden that other areas don’t. Among metro areas with a million or more residents, the Bay Area led the way in the number of remote workers in 2021, the U.S. Census Bureau reported last fall. As in-office perks are taken away and San Francisco’s office space shrinks, anything fun about working in steampunk dungeons and “engineers’ caves” is gone.

Patricia Tang, a product manager who moved from Chicago to San Francisco, tells me she often travels to Café Reveille on Steiner Street to escape her shared Soma apartment. She’s well-known for her reputation, but says the busy environment is encouraging creative techies like herself. “It’s almost Parisian,” she told me over the phone.

The great thing about Café Reveille is that, even if you don’t strike up a conversation—even if you have a point-in-time interaction with someone—there’s a good chance that someone will like you. San Franciscan,” she said.

Still, Tang admits some painful thoughts are true. One day, she said, she saw a man bring his entire work from home to the cafe, laptop racks and all. Another time, she overheard two founders doing a rigorous panel interview in public.

For reasons I can’t fully explain, during my visit, I found myself looking busy even when no one was looking. Maybe it’s because technology has unashamedly transformed a historic romantic meeting place into a dignified, open-air office — just another place to roast another candidate for another obscure job. It was a small but powerful reminder of the workings of our daily lives as we sit there, and the fact that most of us are probably “blinkers” and “practitioners” at worst, and we’re all trying to escape the perpetual control of capitalism.

I finally drank my iced coffee, but at that point, it was mostly just water.

As I sat in the room where everyone seemed to be talking but not talking to each other, I tried to remember how many times I had talked to Moulin, Jerry and Larkin over a Dutch themed dinner or how many friends I had over black coffee. I stayed in the smoking room of the Edinburgh Castle Pub. I thought about the local coffee shop that sold records along my old street in the Tenderloin, and then I remembered that most of these places are gone—the forgotten relics of an ever-changing city.

I worry that I’m one of the shrinking few who find themselves in San Francisco’s disappearing cultural hubs—the neighborhood cafes that once celebrated artists, outsiders, and the working class.

My neighbor finished his important business call and tried to sympathize with the woman next to him. But she said nothing and continued to work in the laptop with robotic strength. As they each packed up their stations and left, an engineer took the opportunity to take over and brought out another computer. I wanted to know what he was doing, but I thought he didn’t want to talk because he was curled up in the fetal position wearing giant headphones.

As I exited the cafe and waited for the Muni near Dubose Park, a cool breeze hit me. Before long, owners were playing with their dogs and people were basking in the sun. Groups of friends sat in the grass, talking, the familiar skyline of the city in the background. After all, it was a beautiful day in San Francisco.