Demitasse Café from “Bosch”

I hope all of my fellow stalkers had a fun and safe Halloween.  For this year’s festivities, the Grim Cheaper and I headed over to our neighbor’s house for an amazing party (the decorations were like nothing I have ever seen!) and had an absolute blast.  Our 2018 costumes were, per usual, celebrity-inspired.  Unusual is the fact that they were all the GC, which typically never happens.  As of late, he has been rather obsessed with Spencer Pratt and his Snapchat feed, though, so when we started discussing costumes this summer, he mentioned that he wanted to dress up as Speidi.  I wasn’t following either Spencer or his wife, Heidi, on social media at the time, but as soon as I took a look at her Instagram stories and saw that she regularly dons a set of black pajamas strikingly similar to a pair I already owned, I was all in!

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Creating the look was a snap.  The GC purchased a tie dye t-shirt from Spencer’s company Pratt Daddy, a signet pinky ring from Amazon, and glued a hummingbird toy that belongs to our cats onto a handheld feeder also found on Amazon.  For Spence’s ubiquitous crystal necklaces, he simply looped some suede twine around two actual Spencer Pratt crystals that he had gifted me for Christmas last year.  The Make Speidi Famous Again hat had to be specially made since they are no longer offered on the Pratt Daddy site.  To round out the look, he wore shorts and tennis shoes already in his closet.  To portray Spencer and Heidi’s baby, Gunner, we utilized the same doll that played Shiloh when the GC and I dressed up as Brad and Angelina in 2006.  I also reused my Emily Maynard wig, purchased a sling carrier on Amazon, grabbed my everyday house slippers, and, voila, our Spencer and Heidi costumes were complete!  The GC completely ate the whole thing up, playing “Look What You Made Me Do” on his iPhone and holding crystals to his head all evening.  It looks like I may be rubbing off on him when it comes to Halloween, finally!    And now, on with the post!

I love a good police procedural.  And, as weird as it may sound (especially considering I couldn’t be a bigger scaredy cat if I tried!), there’s nothing I enjoy more than viewing Law & Order: SVU before bed.  I don’t know what it is about that show – it’s like warm milk to me.  Despite its rather grim nature, it is somehow calming.  And while I could watch it every.single.night., the GC likes to change up our television viewing every so often.  So, on the recommendation of my mom, I recently suggested we give Bosch, the Amazon series based upon Michael Connelly’s detective Harry Bosch novels, a try.  Ten minutes into episode 1 and we were hooked.  I love the show’s noirish roots, lead actor Titus Welliver’s constant deadpan delivery, and the locations.  Oh, the locations!  Set and shot in the City of Angels, Bosch makes spectacular use of real life L.A. locales, some iconic, some lesser known.  I was thrilled to recognize one lesser known spot, Demitasse, while watching Season 2’s “Exit Time.”  The Little Tokyo café is a longtime favorite of mine.  Though I mentioned it in my 2015 guide to Los Angeles’ coffee scene, until I saw it pop up on Bosch, I did not realize it was a filming location.  So I figured it was high time I dedicate a post to the place.

I first discovered Demitasse in October 2011 when I randomly walked by the corner shop on my way to stalk Kyoto Gardens.  The unique contraptions displayed in the front window stopped me right in my tracks and I promptly ventured closer to get a better look.

As the posted sign informed me, the machines were actually Kyoto-style slow-drip iced coffee brewers, aka the “Kyoto Twins,” which “drip water onto coffee beds, allowing the water to slowly extract flavors from the coffee, leaving us with a rich, layered and complex iced coffee.”  Intrigued, I headed right inside, where I ordered what turned out to be one of the best iced lattes of my life!  Since that day, I make it a point to pop into Demitasse whenever I find myself nearby.

Demitasse (which means “small coffee cup”) was the brainchild of Bobak Roshan, a 2008 USC Gould School of Law graduate who found himself more intrigued by java than statutes.  Initially figuring he’d open a café post-retirement, his plans quickly shifted and, in 2010, he traded his law books for grounds.  He found the perfect site to establish his coffee bar in a wedge-shaped spot that formerly housed a frozen yogurt shop on the corner of South San Pedro and Astronaut Ellison S Onizuka Streets.

Demitasse opened its doors to the public on August 15th, 2011.

The inspiration for the café’s horseshoe-shaped interior came from an unusual place.  As Roshan explained to The Rafu Shimpo website, “This bar is actually heavily influenced by sushi bars.  I was in San Francisco once at this place called Sebo.  You sit up at the bar and you talk to the chef and he tells you about the fish and what you’re eating and why it’s fresh and where it comes from.  I thought, ‘This is what coffee should be like.  So we specifically designed [our bar] for making drinks and interacting with customers, so they can sit and watch us work and we can talk to them . . . and we’ve certainly become friends with a lot of our regulars.”

From the beginning, Roshan has utilized the Kyoto method of brewing.  Of the complicated technique, The Rafu Shimpo website says, “The coffee siphon (also called the ‘vacuum coffee pot’) dates back to 1800s Berlin, but fell out of popularity in Europe around the mid-20th century.  The ‘weird contraptions’ are now most popular in Asia, and Demitasse’s siphons, like much of their other equipment, comes from Japan.  Brewing by siphon instead of with a standard coffee maker creates a smoother, more flavorful cup of coffee, taking out much of the body and leaving a drink almost as delicate as tea.”  The process takes a whopping 8 to 16 hours to complete!  The result is well worth it, though.  The Kyoto Twins create some of the richest and creamiest brew I have ever sampled.

In a genius move, Demitasse also serves its iced java in special sake glasses made to keep the cubes separate from the coffee, ensuring that drinks don’t get watered down (one of my biggest pet peeves when it comes to iced brew).

Though the place struggled a bit during its early days, it eventually caught on.  So much so that Roshan opened up two sister outposts – one at 6363 Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Grove and another at 1149 Third Street in Santa Monica.  Today, the Little Tokyo branch is bustling most hours, which is not surprising.  As I said in my 2015 guide to coffee in L.A., grabbing a java at Demitasse is a full-on experience!  It doesn’t hurt that the café is situated along Astronaut Ellison S Onizuka Street, a quaint closed-to-cars block home to countless cute boutiques and shops.

In “Exit Time,” which aired in 2016, Harry Bosch pretends to run into Detectives Brad Conniff (David Marciano) and Julie Espinosa (Jacqueline Pinol) at Demitasse in an attempt to find out what they know about the murder of George Irving (Robbie Jones).  Both the exterior . . .

. . . and interior of the café appeared in the episode.

Because the GC and I have only watched Bosch’s first two seasons, I did not realize until sitting down to write this post that Demitasse has actually been featured in no less than four episodes of the show!  In Season 3, it popped up in “El Compadre” as the spot where Chief Irvin Irving (Lance Reddick) asked Jun Park (Linda Park) out on an official date.

Irving and Jun returned to Demitasse the following season in the episode title “The Coping.”

Jun meets reporter Laura Cook (Kristen Ariza) at the café to give her some off-the-record information in Season 4’s “Book of the Unclaimed Dead.”

And Demitasse pops up briefly in Bosch’s Season 6 premiere, titled “The Overlook,” as the spot where Captain Sarah McCurdy (Jennifer Hasty) briefs Harry and Jerry Edgar (Jamie Hector) on the Sovereigns.

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Until next time, Happy Stalking! 

Stalk It: Demitasse café, from Bosch, is located at 135 South San Pedro Street in Little Tokyo.  You can visit the coffee shop’s official website here.  Portal light installation can be found just up the block in the Weller Court shopping center at 123 Astronaut Ellison S Onizuka Street.  Kinokuniya, one of my favorite book/gift stores, is on Weller Court’s second level directly above Marukai Market.  And Kyoto Gardens from Her is steps away on the third floor of the DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel Los Angeles Downtown at 120 South Los Angeles Street.