Fresh Cup Magazine, providing specialty coffee and tea professionals with unique insight into the trends, ideas, products and people that shape their world.
Issue link: http://freshcup.epubxp.com/i/59523
COASTS WITH THE MOST continued from page 37 HANDSOME COFFEE ROASTERS emanated from Silver Lake," says Thomas Hodges, Lamill's director of coffee. "That was a really exciting time, and I believe that that excitement then traveled and took root in other parts of the city." Ryan Willbur was one of Intelligentsia Silver Lake's original INTELLIGENTSIA baristas, and he says the shop's success came from a combination of community outreach and burgeoning coffee interest. "We were really good at interacting with the neighborhood and trying to bridge gaps culturally," he says, citing Intelligentsia's involvement as coffee host for Silver Lake art shows and music festivals in its early L.A. days. "At the same time, we got a lot of home coffee folks who were waiting for us to open." Intelligentsia's L.A. move continues to be felt in other ways, most recently with the opening of Handsome. The roaster- retailer—run by ex-Intelligentsia workers Phillips, Tyler Wells and Chris Owens—is located in the city's Arts District on the edge of downtown, an area that has benefited from a 1999 ordinance that permitted the conversion of commercial buildings to residential use. "The city did that to try to revitalize the area, and in doing so, we pulled in this amazing creative community," says Phillips. "It's a group of passionate people who are into focusing on a craft and really developing it as much as they can. They've given us the keys to run wild." Many top-tier L.A. coffee people see parallels between what is happening in coffee and what is happening in the greater culinary movement. "We don't see a separation between the two," says 38 Fresh Cup Magazine freshcup.com LOS ANGELES LAMILL Hodges of Lamill. "You have really talented culinary people here working in a really small radius." Ken Yoshitake, owner of three- location Spring for Coffee, which serves coffee from multiple roasters including Stumptown and San Francisco's Ritual, says the city's coffee forward progress is a matter of consumer aware- ness. "Once you start having good-quality food, you can't go back to not-so-good quality," he says. "It's the same thing with coffee." While trend-setting cafés are now dotting Los Angeles, it's a different landscape than bunched-together New York City. Chean says that most of L.A.'s successful cafés have identified specific neighborhoods and won them over one at a time. "Our approach is to set up cafés where there are strong communities," he says, "and then be a hub of that community." Willbur, the former Intelligentsia barista, has lived in Portland for the last few years, but he's getting ready to move—and return to Los Angeles. He wants to open a coffee business, and Los Angeles is his market of choice. "In L.A., there's less tradition and there are no rules, compared with somewhere like Portland," he says. "So I see it as a chance to start over with all the new knowl- edge that we've gained since 1999 when Stumptown was born." BI-COASTAL BLISS While Los Angeles and New York City have many differences in the details, both have proven themselves to be attractive markets for specialty coffee, and it's likely that more out-of-town roasters will continue to join the party. "Going to L.A. or New York is smart," says Karno of Groundwork. "You get the two big media centers on either coast where you're going to get a lot of publicity, and you also hopefully find neighborhoods that want your stores. Then you can work your way into the middle of the country." It's fitting, then, that news recently broke that Handsome Coffee Roasters is already making plans to open in a new city. Its choice? You guessed it: New York. RON DOLLETE SAM FELDER