The short story:

Café Balcony will be opening a new store in the city of Santa Monica and closing the original West LA location by the end of February. The reason is our lease can’t be renewed. We will be relocation to Santa Monica and be open for business in the next couple of months.

It has been a sincere pleasure serving and growing with the West LA community for the last 12 years. We will open our new Santa Monica store in a couple months so in the mean time please visit our good friends at Café Bolivar and Funnel Mill.


The full story:
In April 1997, the original owner “Cookie” opened Café Balcony to serve specialty coffee to West Los Angeles. (FYI, specialty coffee beans are graded at level 1 and 2, level 3 is what starbucks buys and level 4 and lower is supermarket and tourist brands) It was a haven for coffee affectionatos. Years after establishing the store as a place for exceptional coffee he continued on to pursue other dreams and left the store to sister-in-law Joanne. Her run was equally impressive. When she left, business became quiet and “Cookie’s” brother was looking for another replacement. I have been a customer since 1997 and joined the team in this fairly long-running family business in 2004.
It took about a year, but finally as a business, we were ready to expand. So for the last 3 years I’ve been searching hard for the perfect location for a second store. Many deals fell through because of physical short comings such as lack of parking, ceiling height, floor size etc… The goal was to operate two stores near each other in order to share resources and maintain management style. Once again we are close to signing a lease, but we’re still doing our due diligence.

More recently, our building was sold and despite a year and a half of lease negotiations to the new owner, we lost our lease. I fought to keep Café Balcony as long as possible and I hoped to squeeze out another extension in the form of a short-term lease, but that fell through last Saturday. Apparently these kinds of things happen often in business and so there was always a chance of keeping this location, but now that window slid shut.

So now the second store project has become our relocation. I was hoping to make this a smooth transition, but now it looks like we will be down for a couple months before the new store will be ready. Like many of you I will miss this little place which became more of a home than my home. “It is what it is” and Café Balcony is walls with paint and people inside. For me it is a place that attracts people of a certain intellectual prowess on a variety of topics; I learned about preparing proper soup stock, picking a bike lock with a Bic pen, and the organic nature of the economy one cup of siphon coffee at a time. I’m sure you have similar stories, because Café Balcony is definitely conducive to the exchange of ideas through friendship. So thank you all! I hope to capture this character and community spirit and level of friendship in the new store.


Sincerely,
Ray

If you like to be informed of our Grand Opening please send an email to:
with the subject line:
New Café Balcony

http://kushami.com/

Holiday Hours:

Christmas Eve: Noon to 6pm
Christmas Day: Noon to 6pm
New Years Eve: Noon to Midnight
New Years Day: Noon to 6pm

update - both are available until sold out, and as usual there is enough made for a week.

update - Misty Valley delivery was delayed, looking at this wednesday now. So I do have another secret siphon coffee instead, Mexico Nayarit; an unusually good dry-processed bean with intense chocolate character and a strong rustic fruited backdrop.

One of my favorite things to do is try to identify the country origin of a cup of coffee by drinking it. Coffee has more flavor compounds than wine and can produce a complex tasting cup and descriptions are often subtle.

Not the case with the Ethiopian Idido Misty Valley. It's so intense in sweet berry aroma that it's hard not to notice. It's a high quality dry-processed Ethiopian Yirgacheffe, which means the bean was dried with the cherry casing intact and later removed. Yirgacheffe coffees are often wet-processed because it's easier to pull out defects. The Idido farm meticulously visually sorts for the sweetest coffee cherries for their dry-processing which is really rare and shines as a consistently great cup.



I prepare enough for only one week at a time to keep it fresh.