Christine Chiao

Flour + Tea breads and pastries

If Flour + Tea seems like a hybrid of better Taiwanese tea joints and bakeries around San Gabriel Valley, it has everything to do with co-owners (and cousins) Nancy Ou and Johnson Wang whose collective résumé reads like a tea industry road map. Sitting on the corner of Cordova and Arroyo Parkway, the space has a few downtown trappings de rigueur in L.A. real estate: high ceilings, concrete floors, proximity to the Metro (a block away is the Gold Line). Doors were quietly opened on April 2. In a soft-open phase until mid-May, they're still tinkering with recipes.

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T. Nguyen

Sign outside The Coffee Table

After opening 14 years ago on a then-relatively empty strip along Rowena Avenue in Silver Lake, the colorful The Coffee Table served its last cup of coffee this past Sunday. The cafe was a popular meeting spot for neighborhood residents, who now will have to look elsewhere for their cup of joe.

The Coffee Table's lease was over, owners Mike Zamarripa and Brett Schoenhals explain. According to both, Fifteen Group, a "real estate-focused private investment firm" out of Miami, recently bought The Coffee Table's building and declined to extend or renew the cafe's lease. Despite the seemingly short notice - The Coffee Table was showing off a new menu as recently as August 1 - Zamarripa and Schoenhals note that any issues relating to their lease were amicably resolved. Neither knows what the developer will do with the space. "No one's told us anything," Zamarripa says.

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djjewlez/Flickr

LAMILL's "Creme Brulee"

LAMILL Coffee always was ahead of the curve. It was here, mind you, perfecting its coffee roast in Alhambra well before a certain Chicago roaster went west, and it was using pour-over cones and siphon filters while ripples of the third wave of coffee barely were reaching the city's shores. And now, even in the midst of L.A.'s long overdue coffee renaissance, LAMILL stands out not only for its own damn good brand of coffee, but for its hours.

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T. Nguyen

The Handsome team. From left to right: Tyler Wells, Michael Phillips, and Chris Owens

The moment when "things got real", according to Handsome Coffee Roasters's Tyler Wells, was at 6:30 a.m. on May 25, 2011. Six hours earlier, Handsome tweeted an offer many followers could not refuse: the Handsome Wager. In exchange for a $50 ante, Handsome promised to send out at least four bags of coffee. The catch: there was room for only 40 gamblers. By sunrise on Wednesday, the room was overflowing. Not bad for a newly formed company that had yet to roast a single bean.

The First Forty, as this group of beta tasters came to be known, waged wisely: odds are, Handsome would send nothing short of great coffee.

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T. Nguyen

Pour-over coffee at Coffee Tomo

"Hot and fresh" is how Kibum Sung describes his cafe, Coffee Tomo, right off of Sawtelle in West L.A. True to his mission, everything here is hot and fresh, from the coffee roasted on-site to the handmade pretzels. That's right, fresh baked pretzels. Make no mistake though, Coffee Tomo is a first and foremost a coffee shop. "I want you to smell coffee when you walk in," Sung says.

Sung is (another) landscape architect who decided to switch gears and take a new career path into the world of coffee. And while he lives in Irvine (and commutes every day (!)), Sung decided to open Coffee Tomo right off of Sawtelle because he was attracted to the constant foot traffic and believed that the Los Angeles crowd would be receptive to his brand of specialty coffee and expertly pulled espresso shots. Accordingly, there are no brew machines here, only a row of pour-over filters for individually hand-dripped cups of coffee.

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Located a few blocks past LACMA, just off Wilshire, Yuko Kitchen does a brisk lunch business slinging burrito-sized sushi rolls and massive salads with a Japanese bent. The servers are friendly and fashionable. On a recent visit, ours was wearing a giant stiff-brimmed black Yankees hat and white furry boots. However, the real treat, particularly if you're sweating through your business casual togs or trying to freshen up after a mid-day jog, is the frozen mint lemonade ($3.40 for a medium).

First, there's the way it looks. If Kermit the Frog lost an arm in a freak banjo-strumming accident, this stuff would come spurting out of his poor little stump. It's just that green -- as verdant and fluffy as a golf course. Secondly, it tastes as if a whole Ralph's-worth of springy mint bunches have been smashed into oblivion and squeezed into the plastic cup, as if Menthos have been dissolved like Alka-Seltzer tablets into ice-riddled vats of churning lemonade -- but in a good way. It's just a quarter-cup of white rum away from being the best poolside slurpie money can buy, which might, by extension, make it the best afternoon money can buy.

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T. Nguyen

We love Salina's Churro Truck and Mr. Churro and other wonderful places that offer Mexican-style churros, but every once in a while, our sweet tooth gets a hankering for the type of churros you'd find served in parts of Spain and Venezuela. These are a smaller, a bit more delicate and airy than their Mexican counterpart, with a thinner, crispier fried coating sprinkled only with sugar and often served alongside a little cup of thick dipping chocolate. In other words, this a breakfast date with yourself and the paper (print edition) as opposed to a curbside snack.

Until now, finding these churros outside of a restaurant setting was difficult (and no, Xooro, the Wetzel's Pretzels of churros, doesn't really count). We were very excited, then, when we found Churros Calientes, a tiny Madrid-inspired café squished next to the Royal Theater on Santa Monica, that serves exactly that: piping hot churros.

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A few days ago, we listed 10 Places to Get a Damn Good Cup of Coffee. As many of you pointed out (passionately) in our comments, however, there are coffee shops not on the list that also make a great cup. And so, for your handy reference, we mapped L.A.'s best specialty coffee shops. The map includes the spots we highlighted, plus several others that didn't make the list. We made note of the shops that select and roast their own beans (those shops are in all caps), so if you want to drink local, you can.

In total, there are 31 different coffee shops mapped (by happy coincidence, we just mapped the same number of burger places). That's a latte coffee.

T. Nguyen

A Chimney puff and macchiato

The stretch of Main Street between Union Station and the UPS facility where you go to pick up packages after Brown Shorts thrice refuses to leave your package at the door while you're at work is pretty much unremarkable save for LAX-C (a by-the-bulk Asian grocery store) and a row of random shops. Chimney Brick Toast Coffee House, which just opened in December, sits in this row. Once inside, though, it doesn't feel like you're in a random coffee shop so much as it feels like you stepped into Portland. Or, fine, Portlandia.

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J. Ritz

After eleven years in business as Psychobabble, the café on Vermont Avenue just south of Franklin in Los Feliz has been reborn with a streamlined name, attitude and look. Last week Bru Artisan Coffee + Tea opened in the same space.

"I want the emphasis to be on the coffee and tea," says owner Sharleen Mokhtarzadeh, who took some time off to reassess the neighborhood café's focus and concept. Much has changed in broader coffeehouse culture since Psychbabble opened in 1999, back when people wanted overstuffed couches, chairs and board games "like in Friends," Mokhtarzadeh explains. Bru serves coffee from Ritual Roasters in San Francisco and teas from T Salon.

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