The Rise of Backyard Coffee Shops in LA

This is LA's coolest new coffee shop and there's something kind of unusual about it. It's actually in someone's home. And you would never even know it's here. This is Julian, the owner of Loto Coffee in Echo Park. He opened this coffee shop just two months ago, and yes, this is actually the house that he lives in. Really a beautiful house, isn't it? I love the design. These little coffee shops are popping up in residential neighborhoods all over LA, and they could actually solve a few problems within this city. They're making neighborhoods where there's almost nothing within walking distance more walkable, giving neighbors a place to meet each other, and allowing people to try starting a business without taking on the huge financial risk of opening a traditional coffee shop, but not everyone is happy about that. So today I'm going to two of these home coffee shops and talking to the owners. I wanted to find out how these places actually work and whether or not they're a good idea. The first time you come here, I'm not gonna lie, it does feel a little a little awkward almost to be like, am I allowed to do this? Like there's no signs, like I'm just going in this person's house, this person's yard, like this is cool, this is okay. And yeah it is, come on. Come on. This is a very new format for people. People who come in are definitely coming in with a different disposition. They understand they're coming to someone's home, so I think you're just getting a much warmer first interaction than maybe you would have in a traditional commercial setting. At least that's my feeling. It really does have a much different feel than your typical coffee shop. Because there's no barrier from the barista to the patrons, it really just feels more Homie, get an order. Oh, from Chiapas right there. It's busy. So I'm thinking just a classic iced oat latte. Cool. Yeah, you gonna do that for here? Yes. Of course I work with amazing baristas, so they make most of the drinks. I'm the humble maitre d', but I do, I do love a matcha. I do love an oat matcha. I watched many people walk in kind of reluctant and shy at first, but they were amazed by it and really welcomed by everyone that worked here. What did you think the first time you came to work? I didn't even know it was something that was possible. Something that sometimes I feel is unfortunate about living in Los Angeles and like, In the United States in general, sometimes there's too much restriction on those sort of things and it takes away from the community feel. It's like you have to go so far away to just get something that is actually like a really natural idea. Here it's like, oh wow, it's so simple. It's almost like why didn't someone... think about this or allow this before. In Loto Coffee, it's actually much bigger than I expected. A lot of people think actually just from a lot of the photo and content out there that it's actually just this and actually not true. There's a bunch of other seating areas. This is where folks, you know, enter. To be honest, it's mostly closed. We don't even really leave it open. We have like a little sign that says this way to coffee that my wife Stephanie wrote just so folks know to go this way. And you follow it around to the back here. For a lot of people, this is the moment where they discover sort of the scale of what this is. There's actually three levels of seating here. It could probably accommodate more than 30 people and it's all really beautiful and nicely landscaped. Typically like this round here, if you're a bigger group. This place has so much seating, which I love, because I feel like the typical coffee shop nowadays, they're getting rid of seating altogether, or they're making it really uncomfortable, so you don't stay very long. But these home cafes, it's a community vibe. They want you to stay. They want you to like, you know, enjoy your time. And this is just a little side area, which is identical table to the one over there. You can take the stairs up. Here we have some nice grasses along the way and everything kind of just spills over. We just like it kind of wild and quite organic in this place. The second level here has some benches that you can sit on and there's all these like herbs around you. They smell so good when the sun hits them. And you guessed it, even more seating on the third level. I mean, this place has more seating than most coffee shops. As it starts to cool down we have a little fire pit moment here too. This is probably one of the areas that I think people first kind of crawl into when they get here. Now we don't have like tons of altitude here but you do get a nice little view of the the Elysian valley here. The view is quite pretty too because there's all these trees like Most of LA you don't get that. This is a great spot to come and get some work done like it's super relaxing and if your work involves making marketing decks or pitch decks you got to check out the sponsor of this video, Flipsnack. Flipsnack turns pdfs into interactive trackable online flip books. If you're starting a company or a business like this coffee shop and you need to make some kind of pitch deck or some kind of marketing deck, making a flip book is amazing because you can actually track when people click on it, how long they stay on it for, what parts they didn't get to, I love that. With a traditional PDF, you can't do that. You actually don't even know if the person clicked on your PDF. So the analytics you get for it are the coolest part to me. You can upload an existing PDF and turn it into a flip book just really quickly. I made a flip book for one of my real estate listings actually, so I can send this to people who are interested in it. I embedded a whole YouTube video I made about the neighborhood. Can't do that in your typical PDF, can ya? Another cool thing is that you can update this presentation without changing the link. You always have the updated version of it. With PDFs, you can end up with like a bunch of different versions and emails, so someone may end up sharing your old PDF when you have a way better presentation now. Whether you work in marketing, real estate, tech, I mean so many people are having to create some kind of marketing or pitch deck. This makes it easy to do so because they have really great templates. So you can actually get started with Flipsnack for free. They have a free version. So I'll link that down below if you want to try it. Thank you to Flipsnack for sponsoring this video. And now let's get back into the home coffee shops. Do you see a lot of people come here the first time and they're just like, whoa, a bit, a bit of, whoa, I had no idea. Or I had no idea where I was going to. And this is like such a lovely surprise. A lot of people walk in they say does someone actually live here? You know is this like a place you're renting? I'm like no this is our this is my family home. Yeah and um just because it's such a new idea. And so I love telling people that because I think it creates a whole new level of comfort with what they're doing. Yeah or where they're where they're where they are. And I know you're wondering how's the coffee? The coffee is delicious. They actually use beans from Mexico which you can't really find many places in LA. That's delicious. The oat milk latte is so good, too. Delicious. I love it here. I wish this was in my neighborhood. I know, this is very cool. It's busy, like, we couldn't find a seat. People need to open up more of these. He said it's, um, hibiscus and coconut. Mmm, I'm gonna be wired. Every time I come here, I drink way too much coffee because it's so good. So you might be wondering, is this legal? How is this allowed? I've never heard of anything like this. Yes, it is completely legal thanks to a new kind of permit called the Micro Enterprise Home Kitchen Operation Permit. Most people just call it a MECO permit. MECO permits were authorized in 2024, and now we're really starting to see them pop up on the east side of Los Angeles. So with the MECO permits, there's some limitations to it, right? Yeah, there's limitations around... Signage that you can have, also the nature of, like, what the offerings can be. Also, like, there's certain, like, revenue limits in place. So there's, like, some guardrails that are not particularly harsh or, like... These permits do restrict the owners to $100,000 in sales annually. And remember, that's sales. That is not profit. It's not really meant to make people rich from these operations. In fact, a lot of people still have other jobs while running these home coffee shops. I stopped by another one called Granada and talked to one of the owners, Sydney, about her experience running it. I could talk about how I think the MECO program is great forever. The coffee shop was always about community for us. We have other jobs. Granada was the first home coffee shop to open in LA. and it became popular very quickly. We genuinely thought no one would come except our immediate neighbors. Within a week we had like hundreds of people here every day. We had 500 people on Martin Luther King Day. What? Did you turn us all away? Yeah. I mean, everything broke. It was too much for us. It was too much for the neighbors, everything. Like we immediately, when that happened, lowered our hours. Now we're just Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, nine to two, because that was what worked because a holiday was impossible. A weekend is impossible. It's just too much for a neighborhood. If they stayed open every weekend, they would probably blow through the revenue limits in just a couple months. And it would really start to affect the neighborhood. So these places seem great, right? Like what could What could go wrong? I would imagine the neighbors love it. And like I mentioned before, there was one home coffee shop that got shut down for this very reason. It was called Dodo Re Coffee. It was in a backyard of a pretty typical suburban-looking neighborhood. And it had amazing reviews. It seemed like people really loved this place. They actually got shut down because they were in an HOA and... They were having issues with parking. Most people in the neighborhood actually really loved it, but the HOA president didn't. So they had to shut down. But these ones I filmed at today are totally legal. No one in the neighborhood can shut it down. There's no HOA in these neighborhoods. But I mean, yeah, if it blows up on TikTok and there's nowhere to park, I could see how neighbors would get mad at that. And that's why we need more people to open these, okay? Once there's more of these in like every neighborhood, people wouldn't necessarily be driving to a different neighborhood having to park to go to them. You would just go to your local Home Cafe. While making this video I talked to a lot of people about the concept and 95% of people would not ever want to open one of these in their home. But the people that are willing to do it are creating these really cool spots for their community. Whenever we're having interactions with people they're just like really curious and kind and I feel like that's kind of what people feel when they're coming in. What I think is so cool about these places is they're doing something that LA has traditionally made really difficult. The thing is in so many parts of LA You can't walk to anything and a lot of these areas are not zoned for any kind of commercial space. Take Cheviot Hills For example, it's just not possible to open like a coffee shop in the middle of it But now it is possible to open a home cafe I actually think if every neighborhood had a coffee shop like this and if they were also allowed to sell pantry staples like eggs Milk that kind of thing. It would really reduce traffic in LA the Jackson Market in Culver City is the perfect example of this this kind of place. cafe but they also sell pantry staples so not only does this reduce traffic because you've got less people running to the store for one little thing but it really increases the quality of life for the people in these communities. all right i hope that you guys enjoyed this video i'll have FlipSnack linked down below if you guys want to try it i will have Granada and Loto linked down below go check it out if you live in LA they're so cool i love these places that's it for today and i'll see you in my next video bye