Jordan Michelman (editor and co-founder of sprudge) takes you on a walking-and-coffee-ing tour of Chinatown:
, has just eight seats, with a sort of postindustrial vibe: If the spaceship Nostromo from “Alien” had a beverage lab, it would look like this. This suits Benchakul just fine: He’s a decadelong veteran of the biotech world, first at Genentech in San Francisco, then at the Amgen campus in Thousand Oaks. “As I kept moving up the ladder, they kept moving me further and further away from the lab,” Benchakul says, “and then I had a cup of coffee that blew me away, and everything changed.
By night there are still pockets of activity in Chinatown but Broadway is largely quiet, and much of the action happens indoors. In the morning hours the scene at is strictly grab-and-go, a tiny coffee bar serving apartment tenants at Blossom Plaza and commuters for the Chinatown Metro station. But on evening weekend hours, a hidden-in-plain-sight freezer door is unlocked to reveal a dark and twinkling cocktail lounge.
Here the show belongs to cocktailer Jason Yu, who has built a contemporary cocktail menu with global influences and subtle touches of coffee throughout, with house-made coffee cordials and coffee bitters. Coffee cocktails in general — and espresso martinis in particular — are still rare finds on contemporary cocktail menus in the United States.
The frothy sweetness and deep complexity of the drink is offset by subtle flecks of ice, almost like a granita. “I go back and forth on the ice,” Yu told me, but I hope he sticks with it — the textural crunch is like a teaser before the grand final crack of the floating bean. Mine was gone instantly.
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