Photo: Jennifer Swann

Cafeina Galeria from its alleyway entrance on Sunset Blvd.

"This is the story of a cappuccino," says John Ownes, the owner -- as well as the barista -- behind the Spaziale Vivaldi espresso machine at Cafeina Galeria, the new Silver Lake coffee shop that Ownes insists isn't really a coffee shop. "We're a gallery with one bitchin' espresso machine," he says, referring to the small coffee counter and adjacent patio that you might miss if you didn't turn down a narrow alley on a stretch of Sunset Blvd. occupied almost exclusively by auto repair shops.

Once you've figured out how to find the place -- a sandwich board on the sidewalk helps draw in foot traffic, mostly from European tourists with a built-in radar for outdoor patios -- you'll also find an apothecary and a vintage clothing shop. Together, the three mom-and-pop shops are marketing themselves under the name Stopping Station.

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G. Snyder

Goodfella Sandwich at Float

At first inspection, the recently opened Float in Pasadena might appear to be a simple, cozy, new-wave coffee shop -- one that serves locally roasted Handsome Coffee and tea from LAMill. In this part of Pasadena, wedged into an alley of the South Lake Avenue shopping district that looks like it could have been pulled from the pages of a Dickens novel, that alone would be more than welcome (what with the scores of Caltech students just a few blocks away pulling finals week all-nighters).

But owner and Pasadena native Iris Lee wanted Float to feature more than just coffee, and sought to stock her store with some favorite items in Los Angeles. That means daily bagels from Westlake's Brooklyn Bagel Bakery, ice cream from Fosselman's in Alhambra and several shelves of Lee's favorite picks from Highland Park craft soda emporium Galco's.

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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.