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Go Get Em Tiger
Inside the century-old Grand Central Market in downtown Los Angeles, a coffee stall called G&B Coffee opened in 2013 to immediate acclaim — the seed of what's since grown into Go Get Em Tiger, now an eight-café network across the city, with a second café opening in Los Feliz that same founding year. Founders Kyle Glanville and Charles Babinski both spent years at Intelligentsia before striking out on their own, Glanville with real competitive credentials as a former U.S. Barista Champion. The shop's approach leans into transparency and craft without much theater: single-origin coffees are presented with genuine detail about sourcing, and the seasonal drink menu changes often enough that regulars treat a Go Get Em Tiger visit a little like checking what's new rather than defaulting to the same order every time. The minimalist "GG*T" branding and clean café design have become recognizable across the company's expanding footprint. From that 2013 downtown market stall, Go Get Em Tiger has grown into a genuine multi-neighborhood presence across Los Angeles and Culver City, with cafés now spread across Los Feliz, Larchmont Village, Highland Park, Hollywood, and the Arts District, among others — a deliberate, unhurried expansion that has kept the quality consistent rather than chasing rapid scale. That lineage matters for understanding what makes the shop distinct: Glanville and Babinski weren't outsiders trying to break into specialty coffee, they were established insiders from one of the category's defining companies who chose to build something smaller and more neighborhood-scaled instead of chasing Intelligentsia's national footprint. A market stall that opened almost as a side bet has since grown into a bigger footprint than the market it was born in.
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Alfred Coffee
Alfred Coffee's to-go cups, printed with cheeky one-line quotes, have shown up in more Los Angeles Instagram photos than most local coffee brands manage in a decade — a piece of branding that traces back to the original café Alfred opened on Melrose Place in the early 2010s. The friendly, first-name branding and a light, approachable roast profile set it apart from the more clinical, sourcing-forward presentation of some competitors. The Golden/Turmeric Latte is the drink most associated with the brand — a dairy-and-turmeric drink that rode the broader wellness-latte trend of the mid-2010s and became something of a signature order well beyond Los Angeles, showing up on menus and in press coverage far past what a single local café chain usually achieves. Alfred has grown from that single Melrose Place location into a genuine local minichain, with cafés spread across several Los Angeles neighborhoods, each keeping the same light-roast, quick-service format and photogenic branding that built the original location's following in the first place. The brand's growth says something about a particular Los Angeles coffee lane that's different from the direct-trade, single-origin seriousness of shops like Intelligentsia or Go Get Em Tiger — Alfred built its reputation as much on approachability, design, and a specific Los Angeles social scene as on roasting technique, and it's sustained that identity across multiple locations rather than diluting it. Order the turmeric latte and you're ordering the exact drink that put the brand on the map to begin with.
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