Café file · 600 S. Spring St.

CoffeeBar at 600 S. Spring St.

CoffeeBar was a specialty café in downtown Los Angeles’ Historic Core, and coffeebarla.com was its website. This page gathers what three publications reported about it in 2011 and 2012. It is not written by or for CoffeeBar, and it does not claim to know the café’s current status.

Opening

LAist covered the café as a new arrival on February 28, 2011, under the headline “Wake Up & Smell the CoffeeBar”. It named the owners as Michael Leko and Will Shamlian, who had also recently opened the bar Spring Street and owned downtown’s Library Bar. LAist quoted Downtown News describing “a 2,000-square-foot bean emporium that treats coffee more like fine wine than an everyman’s morning wake-up beverage”. Food Republic later dated the opening to 2011 and placed it in the Old Bank District.

The concept

CoffeeBar did not roast. Instead it served coffee from several roasters at once — the multi-roaster model. LAist described the menu as strictly coffee and tea plus a few pastries, and called the café “about as boutique as it gets”.

Roasters, as reported

Equipment, as reported

The two machine names are not necessarily a contradiction — the reports are 18 months apart — but no source found explains the change.

How it was received

• LA Weekly’s Tien Nguyen called it Intelligentsia without the pretension, and said it might serve the best espresso shot you’ve had, depending on the barista.
• An LAist contributor called it “a fabulous new addition to the L.A. coffee scene” and praised its “beautiful simplicity”.
• Food Republic’s Joshua Lurie included it among nine LA cafés defining the multi-roaster trend, and named its signature sandwich: the Peanut, Belly & Jelly.

The setting

600 S. Spring sits at the corner of 6th and Spring in the Spring Street Financial District. Wikipedia lists the building at that address as the 1961 United California Bank by Claud Beelman & Associates — one of the few modern intrusions among the district’s early-20th-century bank buildings. A short walk north is the core of Tom Gilmore’s Old Bank District loft conversions, begun under the city’s 1999 adaptive reuse ordinance. More in Spring Street’s Historic Core.

What isn’t known here

This guide found no reliable published source on when, or whether, CoffeeBar closed, so it makes no claim either way. If you are looking for a coffee at 600 S. Spring today, check a current map listing.