When I moved from Shimane to Los Angeles to start searching for Jonathan and Linda Smith, I did not think it would be hard to find coffee. In bigger Japanese cities you can find all kinds of high quality coffee. A lot of times you can find a small shop run by a person who only cares about coffee. Usually a Japanese coffee shop will have different country's coffees that you can choose...Ethiopian, Guatemalan, Costa Rica, Kona etc. In America, I noticed that you can usually only get one kind of coffee and sometimes they don't tell you what coffee it is...or it is a blend. I had a very hard time to find good coffee in Los Angeles. Most of the coffee in a LA coffee shop is watery or tastes old, like the beans have been sent to live in an old-age rest home. Those beans have forgotten how to be delicious.
Finally I have found two good coffee shops in Los Angeles. These pictures are from Intelligentsia. It's a funny coffee shop in Venice beach, on Abbot Kinney Blvd. It doesn't look like a coffee shop so much. It looks like a kind of futuristic robot beverage factory. This is the kind of factory where robots go to get their oil or robot fluid refilled.
The seats are set up so that you look down on the shop, or you can sit at the entrance so you are watching people walk in. My friend did not like it because she felt like she is in a zoo and everyone is watching her. I did not feel bad about it, because I like going to the zoo, and if the zoo also has good coffee then I am okay.
When you walk in, you can tell that they care about coffee. They have three country's coffees on the menu. El Salvador, Guatemala and Costa Rica. These are favorites of mine :)
This is my cappuchino. I only wish they would have made a nice kitty kat face in the foam. But it was still good.
My other favorite coffee place is The Conservatory in Culver City. They roast beans their everyday. That is where I buy mine. They also have really yummy coffee for sale. It is located next to Sony, so maybe you can have coffee with Adam Sandler. Today he is celebrating Yom Kippur though, so he might not be there.
Last year, I wrote a song about coffee and showed lots of coffee shop signs in Japan and made a video. I hope you will watch it if you haven't seen it yet.