You’ve seen it teased by Eater LA, Zagat, LA Times, and The Daily Meal, but Sprudge.com is first in the world to bring you exclusive photos and details from inside Stumptown Coffee Roasters’ new Los Angeles cafe.
The space itself is a whomping 7,000 square feet, located at 806 S. Santa Fe Ave, in the Arts District of Los Angeles. Stumptown will fill their 7,000 square with a training lab, full service cafe, retail coffee brewing and whole bean sales, and a state of the art roastworks, featuring a 60 kilo Probat roaster and a custom built afterburner to meet strict South Coast air regulation standards. It’s located an out of the way sort of block, quiet, but with cool neighbors like the design firm A Hundred Years, the graphic artist RETNA, and restaurateur Bill Chait’s Bestia (he’s been called “the Danny Meyer of LA” by the Los Angeles Times).
Stumptown LA’s cafe space will be anchored by a La Marzocco Strada MP espresso machine. The paneling and look of the machine are a custom job, done in-house by Stumptown’s head service tech, Alex Lambert. Mr. Lambert is also responsible for the custom Strada machines at Stumptown’s new 8th Street store in lower Manhattan. The cafe’s coffee bar and pastry case was built in Portland, Oregon by the Cook Brothers – Trigger and Silas – artisan woodworkers who’ve worked previously on the lobby of Stumptown’s Portland HQ.
The photos we can show today are selective, and represent the very first look inside Stumptown’s new Los Angeles roasting and retail space. Many more images will made available in the coming weeks, but for today at least, Julie Wolfson scoops the world with this photography, accompanied below by excerpts of her interview with Stumptown’s Director of Operations, Matt Lounsbury.
Matt Lounsbury: “When we first took a look at this building, as Tyler (Stonebreaker) pointed out, we were pretty sold right away that it felt like a Stumptown space and we could make it our own…Our challenge, with our architects and our designers was to keep the industrial vibe of the space but also still have the modern touches that you come to expect from a Stumptown café.”
Why bring Stumptown to LA?
“We have been doing business down here for awhile. We have had customers down here for six years. We started selling coffee to people and coffee started becoming more and more of thing here. For me personally, I have been spending time here for a pretty good chunk of that time.” “It grows every week. What we’ve seen in the last two and a half years was the tipping point for us. California coffee is exploding. In San Francisco, we’ve seen that in the last ten years. We’ve been part of that in different ways, helping incubate Ritual way back when and eventually Four Barrel. Duane Sorenson [Stumptown’s founder] kind of helped get that going with Jeremy Tooker [Four Barrel’s founder].
I think about the broader potential for LA. The reality is this city is huge, with all of these really great neighborhoods. We are from Portland. We have spent time in New York, time in Seattle, but when you come to LA there are a lot of similarities to New York. There is opportunity for everyone in coffee to do well and also there should be a lot more options of coffee to choose from.” “The café will probably happen in the next few weeks before roasting. They each have their own independent hoops we have to jump through. Roasting in the state of California, and in the city of Los Angeles, comes with its own sort of regulatory stuff we have to do. We are in the middle of all of that. So we’re talking about a matter of weeks before the café opens, and then we’ll be roasting as soon as possible after that. Look for more coverage from on us on Stumptown Los Angeles in the coming weeks, and follow @StumptownCoffee on Twitter and Instagram for updates.
Sprudge.com LA staff writer Julie Wolfson contributed original photography and interviews to this feature.
