Ristretto | Los Angeles Coffee Crawl
by Oliver Strand in the NYT
The intrastate rivalry between Los Angeles and San Francisco doesn’t make much sense if you live outside of California. Or really, if you don’t live in the Bay Area. I grew up in one city and went to college a BART ride away from the other, so I feel qualified to paint a picture of the two with broad strokes: Los Angeles is crazy about San Francisco, and San Francisco wishes Los Angeles would go away.
Coffee Commissary, on Fairfax Boulevard
This might explain why one of the great coffee cities in the world has almost nothing to do with one of the largest cities in the world, even though the two share a coastline and a couple of highways. You would think that at least one of the Bay Area’s superb small-batch roasters would send a Sprinter south, set up shop and give millions of Angelenos a taste of what they’ve been missing, but no. San Francisco would much prefer to let Los Angeles figure things out on its own.
And so they did. Chicago’s Intelligentsia Coffee and Tea took a stucco storefront on Sunset Boulevard in Silverlake and became the home team. Since its arrival four years ago, Intelligentsia has opened a total of three coffee shops and a roaster, training a generation of baristas and managers who are going on to start new projects. The Los Angeles coffee scene, which always had good style, now has the substance to back it up.
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