It’s easy to see what Marlon means by expressing himself through the espresso machine – the coffee is excellent, perfectly pulled shots from quality beans. Their impeccable style comes in large part from Pilar and from the artist Juan Renteria – Pilar and Renteria do the design at Café Santo, and they also operate Cuarto Central, an art studio, workspace and gallery just a few doors down.īut it’s not all about aesthetics. There are potted cacti, dried plants and a couple tables near the window, also a brilliant white. The graphics are creative and evocative, with a hand-drawn aesthetic featuring work from Oaxacan artist Mariana Rodriguez Fernandez, set off by the stark white of their shop. When you walk up to Café Santo, it’s clear that this is an artfully designed operation. “With coffee, I can express all the things that I really enjoy, music and art, everything, basically.” “Using an espresso machine for the first time, that was the moment I felt a connection with coffee,” Marlon tells us. That inspiration powered them through the early days as a weekend pop-up while they worked other jobs, and now their adventurous, artistic and collaborative spirit has carried them into a full-time space at BLVD Market, a new-ish food hall in Montebello. Coffee shops – the good ones, at least – are neighborhood gathering places, a spot for friends to catch up, a creative hub for people to meet, an office for remote laptop workers, and a stage for skilled baristas to display their own art.Ĭreating that kind of space for community and artistic expression is what drove Marlon and his partner Pilar Castañeda to open Café Santo, a dedicated Oaxacan-style coffee shop. The second-best thing is that it’s never just coffee. Or actually, the best thing about coffee is caffeine. The best thing about coffee is that it’s never just coffee. They make a fitting symbol for the café’s Oaxaca-native proprietor Marlon Gonzales and Café Santo itself, L.A.’s premier Oaxacan coffee shop. Originally used to hold prayer candles in Oaxaca’s Catholic churches, these votives – with a cross etched into the bottom – are commonplace mezcal drinking glasses in the Mexican state. On the sidewalk it forms a spectral cross, conjuring an image of the bottom of a vaso veladora hovering in front of Café Santo in Montebello. A skinny palm tree on Whittier Boulevard casts a shadow that bisects the short silhouette of a bench.
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