Abbot Kinney

A little more than 150 years ago, a 16-year-old Abbot Kinney landed in San Francisco after completing a tour of Europe. A storm delayed eastward travel back to his home state of New Jersey, so he decided to head south, to a health resort outside of Los Angeles. He arrived without a reservation, fell asleep on a pool table, and awoke the next morning to find he was cured of asthma.

Peculiar? Certainly. But since we’ve never shied away from an idiosyncratic founding story, it only made sense that we set up a coffee kiosk on the sun-drenched LA boulevard in Venice that now bears Kinney’s name.

Our space is a modest and immaculate 650-square-feet, with a Kees van der Westen Spirit espresso machine, our customary drip coffee bar, and a comforting abundance of iced coffee. A James Turrel–inspired LED installation by Techno Maki lends a warm, vibrant pulse—which changes ever-so-slightly with the Southern California seasons—to the kiosk’s clean angularity. And our crew, like the weather, is unflinchingly sunny.