Coffee pioneer recalled as colorful, creative

Pannikin Coffee and Tea founder Bob Sinclair in New Mexico in 2009, with Gay Sinclair. — Megan Heine

( / Megan Heine)

When word spread across San Diego this week about the death of Pannikin Coffee and Tea founder and East Village businessman Bob Sinclair, condolences poured in like brew from a bottomless pot.

“The difference between the East Village with and without Bob is the difference between a black and white photo and one in Technicolor,” said Leslie Wade, a former executive director of the East Village Association.

“He would buy buildings not because he’d done a market study,” commercial real estate broker Lin Martin said. “He would buy buildings because he thought they were unique and special and sort of fell in love with them.”

Sinclair, 68, built his reputation refurbishing everything from motorcycles to old buildings. So it’s fitting his San Diego story begins with something broken — his vehicle.

“The story goes that he had just recently got out of the Navy and his car broke down in La Jolla, and he stayed,” his stepdaughter, Megan Heine, said.

“He opened up this little store on Prospect, which primarily sold cookware and wooden spoons and things like that, the beginnings of gourmet products. He bought a peanut roaster and just as an experiment tried roasting some coffee.”

That was 1968. The namesake for Starbucks was still only a character in a little book titled “Moby Dick,” and Pannikin was nothing more than a Welsh word for small cooking vessel. The United States was rushing headlong into history, and Sinclair saw the beauty — the importance even — of a pause for coffee and conversation.

Later, he saw the beauty and importance of renovating historic buildings.

He put a Pannikin — one of five he opened before selling them in 1997 — in an old Encinitas train station along North Coast Highway, put Brockton Villa Restaurant in an 1894 cottage by a La Jolla pelicans’ perch, put San Diego Mission House Brewery in the 1924 Wonder Bread factory building in East Village.

For several years, the instantly recognizable renaissance man with the handlebar mustache and a penchant for flamboyant hats and southwestern jewelry split time between San Diego and New Mexico. There, he was trying to renovate historic buildings in Taos the same way he did across San Diego County.

“People saw his handlebar mustache and maybe his red hat and his southwestern jewelry and maybe translated that into being a hippie,” Wade said. “But he was a very shrewd businessman. He was very pragmatic about downtown real estate and downtown development. He just had a very creative flair and loved art and loved craft, and he brought that passion for art and craft to everything.”

Sinclair died Saturday from injuries suffered nine days earlier in a motorcycle accident, when he apparently hit a patch of gravel on a four-lane highway near his house in Pojoaque, N.M., Heine said.

He was wearing a bucket helmet, but the brain injury he sustained was too severe. He never recovered from a coma, Heine said.

“He was the healthiest, most fit 68-year-old you’ve ever seen,” she said. “My mom kept telling all the people in the hospital that he’d never been in the hospital. He never even takes aspirin.”

Even in death, Sinclair will keep giving to downtown San Diego. Heine said in lieu of flowers, the family asks that people make donations to complete construction of the new central library.

Woodworker and longtime friend Steve Slaughter assisted Sinclair on numerous projects, building cabinets, putting in stairs, helping with building frames. They often ate lunch at Salazar’s Fine Mexican Food on Market Street in East Village, and Slaughter was struck by Sinclair’s way with everyone.

“I’m not always good with remembering people’s names, but I don’t think Bob ever forgot a name,” Slaughter said. “He knew most of the street people, and they knew him.”

Friends said Sinclair was a rabid collector, with the aesthetic and the money and the eccentricity to amass everything from an assortment of manhole covers to more than a dozen Ducatis and other European motorcycles.

Even his animals and his animals’ names were unusual. He and his wife of 34 years, Gay, owned a pair of Borzois (tall Russian wolf hounds) named Trey and Roald, the latest in a line of Borzois the pair raised over the years.

Besides his wife and stepdaughter, Sinclair is survived by his father, Harry Sinclair; sons Harold and Ken Sinclair; stepson Torrey Lee; and four grandchildren.

The family plans a life celebration in Taos for next week, and a “Bob Party” in San Diego this fall.

At the downtown Pannikin, Verena Garnett said she talked to Sinclair over the phone the day before he died. She and her twin 48-year-old sister, Vivienne, who have co-owned the coffeehouse since 1999, have known Sinclair since the 1980s when Vivienne first worked for him as a sales associate.

“He had a nickname for us,” Verena Garnett said with a laugh. “We were the sisters from hell — las hermanas del infierno. We don’t beat around the bush. We shoot from the hip and tell it like it is.”

Of Sinclair, she added: “We’re probably cut from the same cloth.”

So what did they talk about in their last conversation?

“We wanted him to become our landlord again.”