Kumquat Coffee

The Highland Park room is on York Boulevard, and it is the one The Infatuation put in both their Best Coffee In LA guide and their guide to LA's best Asian-owned cafes. It is sleek and all white and unusually quiet, with baristas working through one of ten pour-overs on the menu while customers browse shelves of Japanese coffee filters and imported chocolates. Coming in off York, where the traffic never lets up, the calm inside lands hard. The drinks are where it gets playful: a Tennessee iced latte with smoked salt, a cloudy latte under peanut butter foam, a kumquat tonic, milk tea with coconut cream. The matcha latte and the ceremonial grade version are both solid, and the hojicha latte is worth the detour. We come here to sit, which is a thing the room actively encourages. It is our pick of the two.