Intelligentsia Coffee

This room reopened from its 2022 rebuild with no espresso machine at all, serving freeze-dried Black Cat off laboratory glassware across Danny Wicke's low counter; it brews to order now, AeroPress or manual lever, on Chicago-roasted coffee whose bags name the farm outright, Finca Juan Martín in Cauca among them. The thing worth knowing is upstairs rather than behind the counter: Peet's took majority control in 2015, and parent JDE Peet's went to Keurig Dr Pepper in a roughly $18 billion deal settling April 2026, the same house that sells Intelligentsia K-Cups.

Intelligentsia roasts to order at its own Chicago facility through Direct Trade relationships in 14 countries, and retail bags name the farm: Colombia's Finca Juan Martín, Peru's El Romerillo grown by Micaela Peña. The Pasadena bar brews to order as AeroPress or manual-lever espresso, replacing the instant-espresso setup it opened with in 2022.

The room is a full 2022 rebuild by Danny Wicke of Prospect Studio, 2,000 square feet in Old Pasadena, with a lowered service counter so the barista faces the guest directly, a choice the shop compares to a sommelier at a wine bar. It opened running freeze-dried espresso off glass beakers on a magnetic stir plate, with milk steamed hands-free on a La Marzocco Wally, the first installed in the US.