Inside Louisa Coffee: West Hollywood’s Boldest New Cafe

Jose Cardozo had already found his first choice. It was a corner spot, where the former “Gay Starbucks” used to be, and he loved it. The landlord wouldn’t budge, so he moved on.

He went searching for another location. He was treating 7626 Santa Monica Blvd. as a fallback when he walked in and then — changed his mind on the spot.

“I didn’t see it until I was looking, for a second option. As soon as I saw it I was like, oh yeah, this is gorgeous, this is the one,” he said.

That building is now Louisa Coffee’s first U.S. location, which had its soft open this week on West Hollywood’s eastside.

The Space

The building dates to 1930 and was designed in an Italian Renaissance style. Exposed brick walls run two floors. Wood bow truss ceilings sit above the bar. The frontage on Santa Monica Boulevard stretches 75 feet. Its most recent tenant was Kings MMA, a martial arts gym with ties to UFC fighters. Before that, in the mid-1980s through 1992, the address was home to Data-Boy, a free LGBTQ entertainment magazine distributed at West Hollywood bars and clubs during the Boystown era.

Jose said the landlord made the deal easy. They shook hands. They filed a change of use to convert it to a restaurant. The City of West Hollywood helped move things along.

Cordoza lives five minutes from the space. He’s a West Hollywood resident, originally from Bolivia, and he said his first cup of coffee was Bolivian. He came to Louisa as a U.S. partner and said the brand’s decision to land in West Hollywood wasn’t random.

“They chose West Hollywood because the investors said, we want the first store to be where everybody’s looking. Where there will be all eyes on [us], he said.

Louisa Coffee was founded in Taiwan in 2006. The chain has more than 600 locations there and has been described as having surpassed Starbucks in its home market. Its first international store opened in Thailand in 2019. The West Hollywood location is its U.S. debut.

Cordoza said the intent isn’t to import a Taiwanese brand into a new market. It’s the opposite.

“We want to feel the culture of West Hollywood, be part of it. We’re not trying to bring something in,” he said.

Cordoza said Louisa is meant to be more than a place to order coffee. He said the space is built for people who want to stay, work, hang out, experience culture. There will be various master class tutorials coming, along with an open invitation to artists of all kinds to showcase their work and share their talents with residents. “It’s not only our space. It’s belongs to our neighbors, the residents, to everyone, he said.

The Coffee and Food

Louisa calls itself a fourth-wave roaster and controls roasting and preparation entirely by hand. Beans are roasted locally. On the food side, Cordoza has partnered with Francesco Lucatorto, an Italian craftsman and owner of Ceci’s Gastronomia. Breakfast is on the menu. So are burritos.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

They’re also putting the finishing touches on an outdoor patio. Parking is available in the back. Rumor is BRICK Fitness has rented the space behind them.

The Exhibition

Cordoza said before they ever opened the doors, they brought six artists in. That was the plan from the start — not to hang some art on the walls, but to open as a gallery. Louisa isn’t positioning the West Hollywood location as just a cafe. It’s calling it the Louisa Art Center, and the shows will rotate.

The inaugural exhibition is “The Great Mother’s Dream: Metamorphosis as Power and Wisdom,” running through August 17. It’s sponsored by the Taiwan Academy of Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Los Angeles and Taiwan’s Ministry of Culture.

Curator Vincent Chiang flew in from Hong Kong. He said he’d spent six years in art production looking for a space that fit the concept he’d been building.

The show pulls from Carl Jung’s concept of the Great Mother archetype. Three groups of artists, four women total. A serpent runs through all of it.

“As a newborn building, newborn space, the artists are showcasing the concept of birth, reborn, and the power of female — all of the artists in front are females,” Chiang said.

The Artists

Ruby Swana is an Amis indigenous artist from Taiwan whose installation work takes up the ground floor. She works with organic material — botanicals, natural fibers, root-like forms that hang in clusters from the ceiling above the bar. Chiang said her work has a quality of growing into the space rather than being placed inside it.

“For her, the sculptural works flow itself. It’s like modern nature. They give you birth. They have life,” he said.

Lu Wei works in ink painting and scroll-based forms. Her large-scale piece covers the rear wall of the ground floor, pulling Utah landscape and American plant life into what’s grounded in Chinese ink tradition. She’s held a residency in Utah.

The third group is Alexandra Carter and Heather Beardsley, an American collaborative duo who’ve worked together for more than five years without living in the same state. Carter’s in Virginia, Beardsley’s in San Diego. They trained an image generator on photographs from a cranberry farm, used cranberry juice to transfer imagery onto secondhand textiles, then shipped the fabric between states so Beardsley could add hand embroidery. The finished pieces hang in a side room — large white textile works with embroidered figures drawn from mythology, sirens, angels, the biblical serpent. Both artists have held residencies in Taiwan.

Chiang said it doesn’t matter whether the art lives in a museum or a coffee shop.

“Whoever comes in, they’ll see the art. They can have their own interpretation and their own feelings,” he said.

Louisa Coffee is at 7626 Santa Monica Blvd. plans to fully open this weekend.