When Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan got married in May 2012, they did so discreetly. Hoping to avoid the media frenzy that would come with official invites, they opened their Palo Alto, California backyard to 100 guests for what Zuckerberg said would be a surprise medical school graduation party for Chan.
Everyone who arrived that Saturday afternoon, including the couple’s parents, was taken aback when they saw Chan in a lace gown and the Facebook chief in a navy-blue suit. Everyone, that is, except Phil and Jacob Jaber.
As the purveyors of Philz Coffee, San Francisco’s alternative answer to Starbucks, father and son were among the few entrusted with Silicon Valley’s biggest secret. On the day of the event they served their signature drinks, which were such a hit that Zuckerberg invited them to the postnuptial brunch the next day.
“I told Mark everything I did was a gift,” says Phil Jaber. “He was touched. … I could have got $10,000 or $15,000 out of him.”
For years San Francisco has kept Philz its own secret. It started from a single coffee station in the Jabers’s Mission District corner market in 2002 and is now a Bay Area institution whose coffee blends have kept their populist appeal in a rapidly gentrifying city. As super-premium local coffee brands have popped up in urban America, Philz is positioned both to challenge Starbucks and to avoid the snobbishness often associated with the so-called ‘third wave’ of coffee. Today at Philz, businessmen brush elbows with firemen and plumbers waiting in a 15-minute line for their fixes of Jacob’s Wonderbar or the iced Mint Mojito.
The company has no espresso-based drinks and is known instead for highly caffeinated blends like medium house roast Tesora, which Phil spent seven years developing. At Philz you won’t find the fancy brewing equipment of an artisanal coffeehouse. Beans are ground to order and then splashed with water at 205-degree Fahrenheit in pour-over funnel brewers. The coffee is good, but not cheap—a small coffee costs almost twice as much as Starbucks’ equivalent. Philz proponents say the value lies as much in the experience, or in what father and son call ‘Grandma’s House’, as in the coffee.
Unlike the corporate uniformity of Starbucks or the manicured hipster haunts like Blue Bottle, Philz has an informal charm that can be found in the mismatched couches at its original location and in the cup-by-cup approach of its baristas, who load drinks with heavy cream and brown sugar to each customer’s preference. “Taste it and make sure it’s perfect,” a barista says before handing over a beverage. Details like that foster “an emotional connection” for customers, says Jacob, 29, the CEO. “We think of ourselves as more in the people business than the coffee business.”
Now 60, Faisal ‘Phil’ Jaber opened San Francisco’s Gateway Liquor & Deli on the corner of 24th Street and Folsom in 1976, seven years after emigrating from Ramallah on the West Bank. For the next three decades, with his iconic fedora and thick moustache, he was a Mission fixture, hawking Marlboros, whiskey and eggs in a largely Latino neighbourhood.
Throughout, he maintained a passion for coffee. As an eight-year-old in Palestine he had sold coffee beans door-to-door and had often spent afternoons at family gatherings where his grandma shared Turkish coffee. On slow days at the store he’d taste-test blends and brewing techniques. He began serving java to customers in 2002. As word spread of the personally brewed coffee that used three times the amount of grounds of a typical cup, lines began to form. By 2003, in the aftermath of the dot-com collapse that decimated grocery and alcohol sales, Phil transitioned his store into a full-fledged coffee operation.
(This story appears in the 29 April, 2016 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)