Alfred Peet died last week ad word got out over the weekend; he was the founder of Peet’s Coffee and, to Berkeleyans in the late 1970s and early 1980s, one of the culinary cultural touchstones of the era, his reputation rivaled only by Alice Waters’. I don’t know anything about food, but people who do have always said Peet set a standard for deeply redolent, very dark roasted coffees. I find them a lot more palatable than the overly hot metallic taste you get in Starbucks, and the aroma to this day (the company has an efficient and classy delivery operation of just-roasted beans) puts me back at the original store at Vine and Walnut. Starbucks is the national coffee phenomenon of the last twenty years, of course, but few knew how Starbucks stores were inspired by Peet’s, or that Peet had trained Starbucks’ founders. (One of them, having departed Starbucks, eventually bought Peet out; in a way, Peet’s was the Apple to Starbucks’ Microsoft. Ha.)

LA Times obit here.

NY Times obit here,

SF Chronicle’s is here.

The company’s own memorial is here, and some of the comments are touching. Here’s my favorite:

I first met him in 1974 when I was 6. He lived next door to my friend, and one day he came over to her house with a huge cake. On the way to meet the adults, he saw us playing, and he pulled us aside and put the cake on a table. He said, “Quick, run your fingers through the icing!” Of course, that is exactly the kind of thing 6 year olds always want to do but are never allowed. Still, we were hesitant, so we only took a couple of small tastes, but he insisted; “no, no, really, go crazy!” So we did, we ran our fingers all through the frosting and messed it up completely. We licked our fingers and he grinned and then brought the wrecked cake in to the grownups. I found out years later that it was his own birthday cake. What a sweetheart! That made a huge impression on me.

Around 10 years ago, I sent him a letter telling him how much that one memory meant to me. He wrote back and said he didn’t remember the incident, but that it sounded like the proper thing to do for young girls and boys who were being trained too hard to be ladies and gentlemen.