The first espresso house on the West Coast, North Beach's Caffe Trieste, has lost its grande dame. The cafe’s co-founder Ida Giotta recently passed away, barely a month after her 101st birthday.
North Beach’s Caffe Trieste at Grant and Vallejo streets has held free Saturday afternoon concerts weekly since the early 1970s, and for years, the main event of those variety shows was the vocal performance of the 69-year-old cafe’s co-founder Ida Giotta. One Saturday this past October, at the age of 101, Ida Giotta came out on her birthday to perform at Cafe Trieste once again, singing all of the words to “La Vita Tutarosa” from memory despite suffering from dementia.
It would be her last performance. The Chronicle reports that Caffe Trieste co-founder Ida Giotta has died. She actually passed two days after Thanksgiving, though her memorial services were Tuesday at Washington Square’s Saints Peter and Paul Church. She was 101.
“For decades, Mamma Ida’s gentle spirit and unwavering love were a quiet yet guiding light behind Caffè Trieste,” the cafe said in a Facebook post after she passed. “A devoted mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, she cared deeply for her family, her community, and every friend who crossed our threshold. Many will remember her for her beautiful voice — a voice that brought joy, comfort, and elegance to the café and to all who heard it. Her kindness, grace, and music touched countless hearts, and the warmth she carried will forever echo through the soul of Caffè Trieste.”
Born in 1924 in Rovinjo di Istria, Italy, Ida met and married 19-year-old fisherman Gianni Giotta in 1940, when she was 15. The two were often refugees bouncing around fascist-occupied Italy before and during World War II. They arrived in the US in 1951 speaking no English, with Gianni finding work as a janitor and window-washer, and Ida as a seamstress.
They opened what we now call Caffe Trieste in 1956 with another Italian couple, though it was originally called Il Piccolo Caffe. The Giottas bought out the other couple and renamed it Caffe Trieste, giving it the namesake of a US-occupied city in Italy where they had once lived.
The place would of course become legendary. It’s hailed as the West Coast's first espresso house, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg were all regulars in the 1960s. It is said that Francis Ford Coppola wrote a great deal of the screenplay to The Godfather at Caffe Trieste.
Caffe Trieste is still owned and operated by successive generations of the Giotta family, and the cafe will be celebrating its 70th anniversary on April 1, 2026.
Related: Joe Betz, Longtime Owner of SF's House of Prime Rib, Dies at 86 [SFist]
Image: Caffe Trieste via Facebook
