This Just In: Ritual Roasters Not Actually a Socialist Organization

The Mission District’s hipster café hotspot, Ritual Roasters, earned a profile in the New York Times Business section today. It seems that despite the red walls, and hammer and sickle inspired insignia, Ritual is - gasp!- a hotbed of capitalism where "body piercings are outnumbered only by the laptops open throughout the room." People who make their money through the interwebs do their wheeling and dealing at the café and at least one man interviewed for the story decided to do some hiring on the fly by climbing atop a chair and shouting: "Is anyone here an ActionScript programmer? We’d like to hire you!" In case you’re wondering what happened to the electrical outlets you used to plug into, owner Eileen Hassi is sick of you buying one cup of coffee and sitting there all freaking day. She covered them over, and when that didn’t deter persistent patrons, she cut the electricity to them. My favorite thing about Ritual is that the concentration of young people and their laptops reliably produces several missed connections a month. A quick search turned up the most recent one, from Mar 29: "at ritual I was embarassed by scratches on my face but you were cute (mission district)." The author attributes their scratches, alarmingly, to "battle scars from the muni tracks" and their object of desire was, of course, sitting at a table, typing on a computer.-Andy Wright