The short story:

Café Balcony will be opening a new store in the city of Santa Monica and closing the original West LA location by the end of February. The reason is our lease can’t be renewed. We will be relocation to Santa Monica and be open for business in the next couple of months.

It has been a sincere pleasure serving and growing with the West LA community for the last 12 years. We will open our new Santa Monica store in a couple months so in the mean time please visit our good friends at Café Bolivar and Funnel Mill.


The full story:
In April 1997, the original owner “Cookie” opened Café Balcony to serve specialty coffee to West Los Angeles. (FYI, specialty coffee beans are graded at level 1 and 2, level 3 is what starbucks buys and level 4 and lower is supermarket and tourist brands) It was a haven for coffee affectionatos. Years after establishing the store as a place for exceptional coffee he continued on to pursue other dreams and left the store to sister-in-law Joanne. Her run was equally impressive. When she left, business became quiet and “Cookie’s” brother was looking for another replacement. I have been a customer since 1997 and joined the team in this fairly long-running family business in 2004.
It took about a year, but finally as a business, we were ready to expand. So for the last 3 years I’ve been searching hard for the perfect location for a second store. Many deals fell through because of physical short comings such as lack of parking, ceiling height, floor size etc… The goal was to operate two stores near each other in order to share resources and maintain management style. Once again we are close to signing a lease, but we’re still doing our due diligence.

More recently, our building was sold and despite a year and a half of lease negotiations to the new owner, we lost our lease. I fought to keep Café Balcony as long as possible and I hoped to squeeze out another extension in the form of a short-term lease, but that fell through last Saturday. Apparently these kinds of things happen often in business and so there was always a chance of keeping this location, but now that window slid shut.

So now the second store project has become our relocation. I was hoping to make this a smooth transition, but now it looks like we will be down for a couple months before the new store will be ready. Like many of you I will miss this little place which became more of a home than my home. “It is what it is” and Café Balcony is walls with paint and people inside. For me it is a place that attracts people of a certain intellectual prowess on a variety of topics; I learned about preparing proper soup stock, picking a bike lock with a Bic pen, and the organic nature of the economy one cup of siphon coffee at a time. I’m sure you have similar stories, because Café Balcony is definitely conducive to the exchange of ideas through friendship. So thank you all! I hope to capture this character and community spirit and level of friendship in the new store.


Sincerely,
Ray

If you like to be informed of our Grand Opening please send an email to:
with the subject line:
New Café Balcony