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Intelligentsia Coffee (Silver Lake)
Intelligentsia opened its Silver Lake location at Sunset Junction on August 17, 2007 — the Chicago-founded roaster's first store outside its home city, and a genuine milestone for a company that had spent more than a decade building its reputation as one of the founders of American third-wave coffee. Choosing Los Angeles, and specifically Silver Lake, for that first expansion said something about where the company saw the next serious coffee market forming. The café brought the same philosophy that built Intelligentsia's Chicago reputation: direct, negotiated relationships with growers rather than commodity-market sourcing, careful in-house roasting, and a dark, full-bodied house blend that's become the default order for newcomers. That approach was still relatively rare in Los Angeles coffee culture in 2007, and Sunset Junction quickly became a reference point for what a serious specialty coffee bar could look like in the city. Intelligentsia has since added Los Angeles-area locations in Venice and Pasadena, but Silver Lake remains the original and the one most identified with the brand's arrival in the city — a laptop-friendly, always-busy café in a neighborhood that's since become one of the most coffee-dense parts of Los Angeles, in no small part because Intelligentsia helped set the bar there first. The Silver Lake café's role as an expansion beachhead rather than a one-off outpost is worth appreciating: opening outside Chicago for the first time in the company's history was a real bet, made specifically on Los Angeles as a market ready for the same rigor Intelligentsia had spent a decade building back home, and the neighborhood's subsequent transformation into a specialty-coffee destination bore that bet out. It's easy to forget, nearly two decades later, that Silver Lake wasn't always a coffee neighborhood — this café is a large part of why it became one.
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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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