Inside Blue Bottle Bradbury In Downtown LA

The sixth Los Angeles location of Blue Bottle Coffee is now open inside the iconic Bradbury Building, on Broadway in the heart of a thriving Downtown LA food and beverage scene that shows no sign of slowing down. The shop opened its doors on New Year’s Eve, and has been in production for more than two years.

The Bradbury Building is its city’s oldest historical landmark building, built in 1893, and has appeared in films like Blade Runner, Chinatown, and more recently in (500) Days Of Summer and The Artist. The new Blue Bottle strives to keep the character and history of the Bradbury intact, in the form of a beautiful ground floor cafe flooded with light through large street-facing windows. The cafe’s sandstone and brick walls and original tile and concrete floor have been brought back to life, given pride of place inside the space. It’s a simple yet vibrant design by the work of Jo Nagasaka of Schemata—the architect behind Blue Bottle’s cafes in Tokyo.

On the coffee side, the offering is mostly similar to what you’ll find in the company’s other LA locations; on the food side, that means a refrigerated food area with overnight oats and grain bowls, plus made-to-order food like poached eggs on toast and Tunisian eggs. What stands out on the coffee side at the Bradbury cafe is the Cold Bar—a coffee cocktail bar serving non-alcoholic drinks like the Oji Old Fashioned (slow-drip coffee & jasmine tea) and the Suzuki Refresher (sparkling cold brew, mint and lime) sourced from recipes developed in-house by Blue Bottle’s team of baristas.

Blue Bottle Bradbury is also home to an unique partnership with LA’s Central Library. The entire rear wall of the cafe is occupied by bookshelves, with books donated by the Library Foundation of Los Angeles. Visitors are able to borrow the books and read inside the cafe—a delightfully analog touch for a new cafe opening in 2017, in a building from 1893. If someone wants to purchase a book, they’re also able to do so with the proceeds going to the Library Foundation. The space plans to host future book club meet-ups and other related events.

With its stone’s-throw proximity to other DTLA destinations like Grand Central Market (home to the groundbreaking original G&B Coffee bar) and the Million Dollar Theater, the Blue Bottle Bradbury shop becomes just the latest must-see coffee destination in the LA core. Hopping from shop to shop across the city streets, there may be no better coffee crawl in America right now—or at least until you cruise down Sunset.

Tatiana Ernst (@TatianaErnst) is a Sprudge staff writer based in Los Angeles. Read more Tatiana Ernst on Sprudge.

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