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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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Philz Coffee (Hollywood)
Philz Coffee traces back to a corner grocery store Phil Jaber ran in San Francisco's Mission District for more than 25 years, where he spent years experimenting with custom coffee blends for regular customers before formalizing that habit into an actual coffee shop in 2003. His son Jacob later took over as CEO and pushed the company from that single Mission District storefront into a chain approaching 70 stores nationally before stepping back from daily operations in 2021. The core idea that built the brand is still what distinguishes it from most specialty coffee competitors: no espresso machines, ever, with every drink built instead from drip coffee custom-blended and sweetened to order at the counter, a genuinely different service model than the standardized menu most cafés run. Mint Mojito Iced Coffee, one of the chain's most distinctive drinks, is a direct descendant of the personalized blending Jaber started doing for regulars at his grocery store decades before Philz existed as a company. Philz has expanded aggressively into Southern California, with locations spread across greater Los Angeles and San Diego alongside its Bay Area home turf — a real, ongoing regional footprint rather than a handful of token outposts, growth backed by outside investor funding that let the company scale past its single-city origins. That expansion into a dense Los Angeles footprint, including a location right on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, is worth noting specifically because it represents a different kind of specialty coffee growth story than most of the rest of this list — not a roaster chasing direct-trade sourcing credentials, but a personalized, blend-to-order service model that scaled a grocery store's worth of customer-first hospitality into dozens of stores. Tell the person behind the counter exactly how you take your coffee and they'll actually build it that way — that's still the entire pitch, decades on.
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