Teri Hope’s Los Gatos Coffee Roasting Company

By Laura Ness | Photography by Coline LeConte | Fall 2025

One of my favorite childhood memories was turning the corner into the coffee aisle of the A&P (Atlantic & Pacific Grocers, long gone) in Hyde Park, NY,
and inhaling the exotic smell of freshly ground beans for the first time. I begged my mom to let me sniff every canister. Heaven! She thought I was weird. How excited I was to grind those beans in the small coffee mill that still sits in my parents’ kitchen, enjoying the aromas that took me to faraway places like Indonesia and Colombia.

While we grew string beans and lima beans, we couldn’t grow coffee beans. My grandmother told me that coffee only came from equatorial regions, high in the rain forests. My imagination ran wild with thoughts of all the colorful birds and exotic creatures that must inhabit such a world. My parents went through many phases of coffee brewing, including an electric percolator, a Chemex, a stovetop pot and eventually a Mr. Coffee. When the instant coffee craze arrived, my parents ditched the beans. A ritual was lost—and, with it, a connection to place.

The advent of Nespresso, Keurig and the like has made coffee more like a protein powder: a thing of convenience instead of a ceremony. Something that comes from a processing lab and not a tree. It’s no wonder we’re losing touch with the true origin of coffee.

“I wanted to create a place where people could come to socialize if they wanted, or just enjoy a good cup of coffee,” says Hope. “I didn’t want people to feel rushed; I wanted it to be a community.”

And yet, it all comes down to beans. Teri Hope, founder of Los Gatos Coffee Roasting Company (LGCRC), is a lifelong resident of Los Gatos and has had a lasting love affair with beans. She started the Los Gatos coffee shop back in 1982 because she wanted to create the kind of community she had come to love in San Francisco’s North Beach.

As a single mom, she was working at a women’s health clinic in San Jose, observing how a small business operated. On her days off, she would travel to San Francisco to enjoy an amazing cup of coffee or cappuccino at Graffeo’s, a family- owned and -operated North Beach institution. After reading the daily newspaper or a book, she’d go down the street to the coffee roasting company and buy her pound of freshly roasted beans. While driving home one day, she computed that she was driving 100 miles round trip for a pound of coffee. She thought about combining the two disparate businesses into one. To her knowledge, it had never been done before in the U.S.

Driven by this vision, Hope opened the first-of-its-kind beverage service and in-house roaster in Los Gatos. “I wanted to create a place where people could come to socialize if they wanted, or just enjoy a good cup of coffee,” says Hope. “I didn’t want people to feel rushed; I wanted it to be a community.”

Hope recounts San Francisco’s rich history in coffee, with the likes of Folgers and MJB having major operations there. When she got started, there were few women in the business, and she worked with a woman broker who led her to sources of the best beans on the market.

Meeting like-minded people around the country, she helped found a cooperative and trade organization, called the Specialty Coffee Roasters of America. The members were invited by coffee-producing nations to visit their plantations, enabling them to establish relationships directly with growers. At the same time, as Americans traveled more overseas they saw firsthand the café lifestyle of Europe and wanted to re-create that at home. Small coffee roasters flourished, until one—a Starbucks in Seattle—changed everything.

Hope says Starbucks was a blessing and a curse: “At least they made coffee cool! They did a huge favor for us all.” So popular was her concept that she opened up an outpost in Carmel-by-the-Sea, and one at the Stanford Mall called Palo Alto Coffee Roasting. Ironically, when the mall sold in 1999, Starbucks edged her out. But that allowed her to both focus on the Los Gatos shop and spend more time with her granddaughter.

“Hope says Starbucks was a blessing and a curse: “At least they made coffee cool!”

“My shop was among the first wave of the specialty gourmet coffee movement of
the late ’70s and early
’80s,” she says. “This
was followed by the second wave of big players including Starbucks and Peet’s of the ’90s, and more recently by the third wave of smaller specialty roasters that are making their mark in the industry, such as Verve. The Roasting Company is one of the few surviving ‘first wave’ shops who have stood the test of time.”

HAWAII AND HER PURSUIT OF BEANS

From the outset, Hope purchased only cream-of-the-crop, organically grown coffee beans. The big houses like MJB, Nestle and Starbucks buy stuff she would never consider, she says. She visited coffee plantations in Guatemala, Zimbabwe, Costa Rica and Kenya, sourcing only the best. She has always paid more, about double what mediocre beans run, and 25% of the weight is lost during roasting. And so you might find the LGCRC price per pound to seem costly. However, Hope points out that you are getting 50 to 60 cups of sensational coffee out of that bag.

Hope became so selective about her beans that she bought her own seven-acre piece of property on the Kona Coast of Hawaii. Her engineer father, upon his retirement, moved to Hawaii and purchased additional acreage for his own plantation. She says the volcanic soils there are critical to great coffee. Elevation also plays a key role, as does sufficient rainfall. Her dad was the first to install drip irrigation, and his was the only farm to look lush and vibrant when the first drought hit.

SHELVING THE MUG

In 2018, Hope sold majority stock of the shop to a former Los Gatos resident, Gerry Ford, who owns a global chain of coffee establishments called Caffè Nero. But there’s no intention of turning LGCRC into a Caffè Nero. A Stanford graduate who began his career at HP, Ford also owns Centonove restaurant next door. She expects the shop to continue operating as it always has, as a vital part of the community, and feels that Ford recognizes that value. And while the sale went through years ago, Hope continues to work part time at the coffeehouse managing its live music program (Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays).

It’s a place where you can not only get a great cup of coffee or choose from a fantastic selection of baked goods, you can also catch up with friends, meet people for interviews, grab lunch while you’re waiting for your car to be serviced, charge
up your laptop or maybe read the local paper.

You can find Peruvian, Pacific Island and Central American coffee varieties here, along with special blends including Stanford, Palo Alto, Teri’s Los Gatos and Redwood Estates, which she created for the Summit Store.

During many a power outage in the mountains over the past 30 years that I’ve been coming here, it’s served as a lifeline. Many coffee shops discourage lingering, but Los Gatos Coffee Roasting Company has always been a welcoming, warm sip of comfort. When I thanked Hope for providing such a vital service, she simply said, “Mi casa, su casa. You are always welcome here.”

Laura Ness, aka “Her VineNess,” is a wine journalist and wine competition judge who covers every aspect of the wine business: the good, the bad and the verboten. She pens wine columns for many local journals, including several Edible Communities publications. She carries a corkscrew in every purse, but wishes all winemakers would use screwcaps.