In a year of dwindling sales, the suits at Starbucks corporate could learn something from Vida Sharp and Tom Emanuel of Third Wheel Coffee. The partners in business, life, and beans don’t have tables or chairs. They don’t offer WiFi. They don’t even have their own shop.
But they do have 19 coffee and tea options on their menu, their own cold brew, and a welcoming corner in Lucinda’s Deli, half a block from San Francisco’s Alamo Square Park. They run Third Wheel behind a movable counter on casters, which is, as some locals would say, hella appropriate. Because moving around is a key part of their story.
The past two years, Third Wheel has become a neighborhood staple for weekenders and work-from-homers at Lucinda’s, a tiny takeout shop whose overstuffed sandwiches frequent Bay Area best-of lists. But they spent their first two years without a home base — unless you count San Francisco itself. Sharp and Emanuel grew up in the city.
They first pedaled an espresso machine around on a rigged-up tricycle, then upgraded to a coffee cart that they parked at events. After literally building Third Wheel from the sidewalk up, the 24-year-olds say they’ve doubled sales in the past two years.
They’ve expanded their team to include five rotating baristas — the couple felt confident enough to take their first big overseas vacation recently — and have evolved their menu by the whims of their customers and their own creativity. Or, as Sharp describes it, they’re “more legit.”
It’s not a narrative we often hear. Since the pandemic and early lockdown crushed small businesses, SF has tried various reforms to help. All the while, Sharp and Emanuel have steered clear of grant money. They pedaled solo until they joined forces with Lucinda’s. Now that they share space with another business, they’re not sure how they fit into the shifting bureaucratic categories.
“People will come to us and ask, ‘Hey, I want to start my own business like what you guys are doing — how do I do this?’” says Emanuel. “There’s really not a simple answer.” Sharp adds: “Just don’t think too much about it.”
Small caffeinated world
Sharp and Emanuel grew up in Noe Valley but didn’t meet until they both started working at Noe Cafe in 2020. That’s where they fell in love — yes, with each other, but also with the logistics of operating a business. They started to fill a notebook with ideas for a future coffee business.
The ride hasn’t been bump-free. The improvised tricycle was impossible to permit and impractical to move up, down, and around San Francisco’s steep hills. The more portable coffee cart, rigged up from a vintage liquor cabinet, allowed them to get a catering permit. At one event, they met Lucinda’s owner Ryan Chinchilla, who was trying, unsuccessfully, to run his own coffee service.
“It was so inefficient, and honestly I didn’t know anything about coffee,” Chinchilla tells The Frisc. He had spent a year and a half getting Lucinda’s off the ground, navigating codes and construction on his own through the pandemic. “I had nobody to lean on. And that sucked.”
After opening in June 2020, he started to pay it forward, hosting businesses selling everything from flowers to greeting cards. Bringing in Third Wheel made sense for his business and for theirs: “I looked at having Tom and Vida as shielding them under my wing.”
An emerging pandemic trend also helped Third Wheel find their way: “spaceless businesses,” Emanuel’s term for grassroots efforts like Bird and Bear Coffee, a coffee roastery run by a couple in their Cole Valley garage, and pastry makers Bernal Bakery and Saltwater Bakeshop.
It’s super important to help out others in the industry. Of course you can go into it on your own, but it’s going to be more painful that way.
paper son coffee owner alex pong, who worked at third wheel to learn how to run a coffee business. Pong now hosts ‘coffee residencies’ at his own shop.
Third Wheel is no longer spaceless, but what is it? Not a pop-up, an official designation that bakes in specific time limits. They’re more likely, in city jargon, part of a “multi-use business,” a place where multiple registered businesses can operate under one roof. In a shared food and beverage space, this is relatively seamless. Chinchilla says his deli is technically a market, so he’s not sure if they qualify.
Katy Tang, director of the city’s Office of Small Business, is aware that small businesses often pioneer their own ways of working. “We love the creativity. We love that they push us to challenge what we see in the codes, [which] can be prohibitive,” Tang tells The Frisc. “We want, at least in our office, to foster that creativity and that flexibility.”
Whatever you call Third Wheel these days, it seems to have sparked a small movement.
Breaking new grounds
In 2023, Paper Son Coffee owner Alex Pong worked at Third Wheel to learn the ropes of running a coffee shop. That August, he started what he called a “coffee residency” at Neighbor Bakehouse in Dogpatch.
In 2024, Pong also moved into his own spot on Second Street in SoMa through the city’s Vacant to Vibrant program, which offers free rent for local businesses to temporarily operate in an empty retail space. He’s carrying forward the residency idea there by hosting coffee pop-ups. He doesn’t just offer space; he offers guidance for dealing with city bureaucracy.
“I think it is super important to help out others in the industry,” he tells The Frisc. “Of course you can go into it on your own, but it’s going to be more painful that way.”
Though Sharp and Emanuel are optimistic about their business, they admit that running Third Wheel is really hard. Espresso machines break, often in the middle of a rush of orders. Sink installations don’t go as planned. Everything is expensive — repairs, supplies, ingredients, and self-employment taxes in a banner year, one of their biggest challenges right now. (Chinchilla similarly laments about taxes.)
Sharp and Emanuel also take on hard work that they don’t strictly need to. They respond to every single online review so their customers know real people are behind the business. (They have a perfect 5-star rating on Google.) Until January, they stored their customers’ loyalty punch cards for them until the sheer volume became impractical.
They’ve also listened to customers in a different way. Despite original intentions to be a “pure” espresso bar, they expanded their menu to cater to people’s tastes and now make their own flavored syrups: vanilla, rose-cardamom, and lavender. “It’s way more about the people, and reaching more people by having more offerings on the menu,” says Sharp. “We don’t want to be exclusive.”
This welcoming approach has allowed Third Wheel to grow a coterie of neighborhood regulars. Some have become employees; Jessie Romine started in June 2023 and still works there. Others have been recipe developers: regular Glen Wick came up with Glen’s Coconut Cold Brew, a fatty coconut-oil concoction that debuted as a summertime drink but was so delicious people demanded it stay permanently.
Sharp and Emanuel’s dream of opening their own shop is no secret. They profess it on their website. But they don’t want to leave their current customers, so they’d like to find a storefront in the same neighborhood or the Lower Haight where they live.
“It’s really important for us to be serving our neighbors and our community and not just going and opening a space in a neighborhood where we don’t really know what they need,” says Sharp.
Based on the line out the door on Saturdays, perhaps it’s a lesson for the city as well — to let businesses lead the way in creating what they need.
Correction, 2/07/25, 2pm: This story previously misspelled Paper Son Coffee. It has been corrected.