Compelling Coffee

The product pages here go all the way to the invoice: washing station, varietal, harvest, and $4.85 a pound paid for the Burundi Kayanza grown by 289 farmers at Nkuba. The room plays vinyl all day and pours nothing but its own roast, though the V60 and Kalita recipes it publishes are written for a home kitchen rather than this counter.

• hi-fi listening
• quiet mornings
• casual meetups
• breakfast sandwiches

House-roasted throughout, with retail sold roast-to-order and product pages that disclose the washing station, the varietal, the harvest window and the per-pound price paid at origin — the one gap being that no roast date is printed.

The Burbank Boulevard room is pitched as a hi-fi bar, vinyl playing all day behind a full coffee and food menu. Building a listening room around a coffee counter is a bet on how long people stay.