Maru Coffee, Los Feliz

Jacob Park and Joonmo Kim met working at a coffee shop, spent about three years planning, and opened Maru on Hillhurst in late September 2016. The name comes from the Korean phrase San Ma Ru, meaning mountaintop, their shorthand for the idea that the best coffee comes from high elevation, and the standard they were trying to hit.

Roasts in-house

Maru Coffee

Maru roasts its own coffee now, out of a facility in Glassell Park, a shift from the rotating guest-roaster program (Coava, Sweet Bloom, Stereoscope) they ran when Los Feliz first opened. The house blend, Sanmi, is built from Grade 1 Ethiopian lots only, tasted down from dozens each harvest, roasted as two separate coffees (one natural, one washed) then blended.

A precise, restrained house program: the San-Mi espresso and the signature cream-top are built on the bean rather than the syrup, and both are very good.

The Los Feliz room is blond wood and gallery-quiet, with almost no seating and no wifi to keep a laptop alive. Cenitz Studio wrote the brand around ritual and balance, and the room takes it literally: you came here to drink a coffee, and there is nothing else on offer.

A narrow Hillhurst room the founders designed and built themselves. Jacob Park and Joonmo Kim have no design training and hired no designer, working, in their words, from intuition. Light birch accents, maple stools and a communal sycamore table they made themselves, off-white walls, a few plants, and open shelving of beans and cups behind a bar that makes the coffee program feel exposed rather than decorative. Spare and minimalist, with limited seating; built for one precise drink and a short pause, not a long sit. Notary Ceramics in Portland made custom ceramic pieces for the bar: mugs, matcha prep bowls, and tea bowls.

Design · Self-designed and self-built by founders Jacob Park and Joonmo Kim, with no formal design training and no outside designer hired (Faculty Department quotes them: 'We don't have design backgrounds and we didn't hire a designer. We've worked from intuition')

• minimalist
• Korean-influenced
• light wood
• self-built
• open bar
• stand-and-go