When Matthew Clark opens his pop-up coffee shop on Main Street in Los Gatos each weekend, he’s serving drinks based not only on his own travel experiences but on the taste buds of his friends and neighbors.
Clark, a Los Gatos resident of almost 15 years, established Sipbie Caffe in September 2019. Clark’s is one of just a few Black-owned businesses in town, where just 1.3% of its approximately 33,000 residents are Black.
Clark grew up in Milpitas, then moved to Chicago to work as a banker. He settled in Los Gatos in 2012 before taking a corporate job in Sunnyvale in 2016. While he says Los Gatos is a “Green Book-friendly town,” referencing the famous guidebook for African Americans traveling by car, there are echoes of racism in the town’s history…