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.

• Tasting the craft
• A focused coffee break
• A quiet date

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 — 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