There's a coffee shop on Hillhurst in Los Feliz that I've been going to for three years. I won't name it because the last thing I need is for it to get discovered by the kind of people who take photos of their latte art and post it with a geotag. It's mine. I found it. The line is short and I intend to keep it that way.
I order the same thing every time. Black pour-over. No milk. No sugar. No oat-whatever. No "can you do it with lavender." Just coffee. The way coffee is supposed to taste when you stop burying it under fourteen dollars of modifications.
People think this makes me difficult. I prefer "specific."
It's Not About Being Fancy.
I'm not one of those guys. I don't own a four-hundred-dollar hand grinder. I don't talk about altitude or terroir or the "notes of stone fruit" in my morning cup like I'm reviewing a bottle of wine. I'm not auditioning for a specialty coffee documentary. I just care about whether it's good. And most of it isn't.
Most coffee in America is terrible. I'll say it. The stuff people drink every morning — the auto-drip at the office, the drive-through chains, the pod machines that turn coffee into a capsule like it's medication — is objectively bad. Not because it's cheap. Because nobody making it gives a damn.
There's this idea that caring about coffee makes you pretentious. That having standards for the thing you drink every single day of your life is somehow elitist. Meanwhile, nobody blinks when someone has opinions about beer or whiskey or wine. A guy who knows the difference between a pale ale and an IPA is "knowledgeable." A guy who knows the difference between a natural process Ethiopian and a washed Colombian is "a lot."
I'm a lot. I've made peace with it.
Nobody blinks when someone has opinions about whiskey. But know your coffee beans and suddenly you're "a lot."
The Pour-Over Thing.
Yes, I'm a pour-over person. I know how that sounds. I know there's an entire internet comedy genre built around people like me. The slow ritual. The gooseneck kettle. The careful circles. The timer. I've heard every joke, and I don't care, because the coffee is better and I'm tired of pretending it's not.
A pour-over takes four minutes. That's it. Four minutes of standing in your kitchen, doing one thing, on purpose. In a world where I'm checking three phones, running multiple businesses, answering emails at 6 AM, and mentally planning the next twelve hours before my feet hit the floor — four minutes of intentional silence while water passes through a filter is the closest thing I have to meditation.
I'm not going to pretend it's spiritual. It's coffee. But the ritual matters more than people think. The act of slowing down, even for four minutes, before the day starts — that has value. I didn't understand that until I was deep into my forties and running on fumes from years of treating mornings like a speed run.
minutes. That's what a pour-over takes. Four minutes of standing still on purpose. Most people can't do it.
LA Coffee Is Underrated.
People talk about Portland and Seattle and Brooklyn when they talk about coffee cities. LA barely gets mentioned. Which is insane, because the coffee scene here is world-class and has been for over a decade.
I'm not talking about the Instagram spots. Not the places where the aesthetic matters more than the extraction. I'm talking about the roasters who've been doing this since before it was cool — the ones in strip malls and side streets and neighborhoods that don't have a Wikipedia page. The places where the barista knows your order because you've been coming in three times a week for two years, not because they wrote it on a cup.
I've had better coffee in Los Angeles than anywhere else I've traveled. And I've been to places where they'll look at you like you've insulted their mother if you order the wrong drink at the wrong time of day. LA still wins. We don't get credit for it because this city never gets credit for the things it does best — only blame for the things it doesn't.
LA's coffee scene is world-class. We don't get credit because this city never gets credit for the things it does best.
What Your Coffee Order Says About You.
I have a theory — and I know this is going to make people mad, which is how I know it's worth saying — that your coffee order reveals more about you than your Zodiac sign, your Enneagram number, and your Spotify Wrapped combined.
Black coffee: you have things to do and you're not here to play around. Respect.
Oat milk latte: you're a thoughtful person who reads the ingredients on everything and probably has a favorite tote bag. Fine.
Frappuccino: you don't actually like coffee. You like a milkshake. Just say that. There's no shame in it, but stop calling it coffee.
Cold brew with sweet cream: you discovered coffee in 2019 and this is as far as you've gotten. You'll evolve. Give it time.
Espresso, straight: you've either been to Europe or you're in a hurry. Either way, I trust you.
I know this is reductive. I don't care. My theory, my rules.
It's Not Really About Coffee.
The honest truth is that coffee is the one thing in my life where I have complete control. I pick the beans. I control the water temperature. I decide when it's done. Nobody's on a Zoom call asking me to adjust the grind size. No one's sending a Slack message about the extraction ratio. It's mine.
When you run businesses and manage people and make a hundred decisions before noon, you need something that's just yours. Something where the only variable is how much attention you're willing to pay. For some people it's golf. For others it's cooking or woodworking or fishing. For me it's standing in my kitchen at 5:45 AM with a kettle and a filter and four minutes of silence.
In a world that wants everything fast, cheap, and frictionless, choosing to care about something small is the most radical thing you can do. We've optimized ourselves into numbness. Every morning routine is a "hack." Every meal is a "fuel source." Every hobby needs a monetization strategy. Sometimes a thing can just be a thing you love because you love it.
I love coffee. Not the culture. Not the brand. Not the aesthetic. The actual drink. The way a good cup tastes at 6 AM when the house is quiet and the day hasn't started demanding things from me yet. That moment — just me and the coffee and the silence — is the best part of my day. Every day.
I'll keep my pour-over. I'll keep my unnamed Los Feliz shop. I'll keep being "a lot" about a beverage that most people treat like an afterthought.
The coffee's worth it. So is the silence.