Blank Street

Blank Street is candid about what it has become: matcha is more than half the business, and the word "coffee" is sliding to second position on the company's own signage. Los Angeles got its own drink for the opening, the Cortado Cloud, layered vanilla bean or matcha under a lightly salted cream top.

Espresso here is automated: Blank Street runs Swiss-made Eversys machines chain-wide, where the whole drink arrives at the press of a button, and no manual brew appears anywhere on the menu. Three blends sit on the retail shelf under the brand's own label, named by roast level: Lighter Roast for milk chocolate, cashew and raspberry, Darker Roast for dark chocolate, pecan and cherry compote, and a decaf that is the only one of the three to name a country, Colombia.

The in-house team under global design director Paola Han works to a tension the company calls "tofu and cigarettes", sleek and restrained on one side, a little wild on the other, and it flew in from London to tour the Stahl House and the Sheats-Goldstein before drawing this room. In Studio City that reads as a wood-slat ceiling over a curved fluted stainless counter, pale green terrazzo underfoot, a sage-green banquette, and vintage hi-fi speakers hung on chains in a nod to the production studios up the street.