guess who’s coming home for coffee?
macchiato at Nomad Hotel
Me. These days and past few years, I’ve had the privilege of being a bi-coastal dweller in America. L.A. is home-home. Two homes back to back for emphasis, to describe the place that birth me, shaped me, gave me a sensibility of energy unlike any other place I know.
N.Y. is home, the place I’ve made mine in my adult years, the place where my creativity lives and thrives among boroughs interconnected by trains, where storefronts kiss brownstones like cousins and stories are granted to the human that is aware that looking for story isn’t the wave, when all she has to do is align with it.
Among many corners that are being renovated to become improved versions of what once was plagued by economic tragedy, abandonment and dilapidation, there is a corner in DTLA where a historic beauty stands: Gianni Place. A couple years shy of one hundred years old, its Italian roots invite you into a visual echo chamber of decorative ceilings, marble tables and drawn drapes in a tapestry scheme that eerily mimics a coffee cherry tree.
On two separate visits I imbibed some of its menu. Espresso by milk was like the Sunday morning breakfasts of my childhood when my father made us pancakes with the special syrup: golden butter and boysenberry syrup.
On a return visit, I had one of their ‘caffé inspired cocktails’, the spritz. It was like drinking cologne, in a good way. It was coffee infused dry vermouth, amara abano, grapefruit, cinnamon, vanilla, tonic ($16). The coffee, is infused with liquor, on the bar premises for up to 15 minutes. It was frisky sweet, like the kind of sweet I imagine, a Rat Pack Sammy Davis would be, the way he impassioned his way into the hearts of Americans with nice lyrics and sly content. The kind of sweet, that comes from being wisely drunk in the sounds of a musician at the foot of his stage, at the curvature of a coffee bar.
Guess who’s coming home for coffee. I am. You should join me.
649 South Olive & 8th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90014