Collage Coffee
Coffee shop · Highland Park ·
Breakfast sandwiches, waffles, pastries, chia pudding, coffee, espresso
Breakfast sandwiches, waffles, pastries, chia pudding, coffee, espresso
"An L.A. neighborhood coffee shop that closed on March 19 at the start of the pandemic; its owner taped a note to the window saying they would reopen when the situation was less fraught and used the downtime to pivot into other food projects, ultimately leading him to build a backyard pizza operation." - ByEmily Wilson
"As a small takeaway on York with a back patio suited for gatherings, Collage Coffee was run by Kevin Hockin until it closed at the start of lockdown orders in March; Hockin says it will reopen soon, and its low-overhead, roughly 200-square-foot footprint allowed him the flexibility to build a backyard oven and start Side Pie." - Farley Elliott
"An intimate Highland Park coffee shop celebrated for consistently producing some of the best cups in the city, prized by contributors when straight caffeine is the priority." - Matthew Kang
"Serving as the weekday home base for a Wednesday breakfast pop-up, Collage Coffee is the spot behind which the pop-up operates before the concept moves to evening hours on Saturday." - Farley Elliott
"Every Wednesday morning at 8 a.m. I head behind Collage Coffee in Highland Park for chef Zoë Komarin’s pita party, where you look for a sign leaning on the pebbly alley to the right of the York Boulevard coffee shop and find Komarin—curly-haired—working over a camping stove with a makeshift table garden of foraged edible flowers and bamboo steamers protecting her prized pitas. Her pitas are fluffy and chewy, the ideal pocket partner for the rotating $10 fillings she changes weekly: one week she stuffs labneh with marinated Anaheim peppers, dilly scrambled eggs, cilantro, cardamom schug, chunky carrot salad, and mustard greens; another week she serves an egg banh mi–style pita with sriracha mayo, pickled veggies, dill scrambled eggs with fresh turmeric chips, and her vegetarian “thunder sauce” (XO sauce). The pop-up is as much about food as it is about connection—Komarin says her ghost ingredient is human connection, hoping people get loose, meet new people over a messy pita, and leave feeling awake and present—and she amplifies that vibe with '90s Rugrats–esque hand-drawn merch (matches, VIP cards, signage). Her devotion to the perfect pita grew from a seven-year stint in Tel Aviv (where she worked at Café Xoho), a craving for the chewy pitas she found there, and intensive experimenting—“10 days of two batches a day”—to uncover the recipe she now sells until sold out." - Linda Hosmer