Blank Street Coffee Lands in Los Angeles, With Ice Cream on the Way

Days after Blank Street Coffee opened in Los Angeles, a line stretched "down the street" despite 103-degree heat, a local source told Daily Coffee News.

The Brooklyn-born coffee and matcha chain opened its first West Coast cafe on Aug. 12 at 13273 Ventura Blvd. in Studio City, a Los Angeles neighborhood with deep roots in the entertainment business. It's the company's 106th location.

"Studio City felt right for our California debut," co-founder and CEO Issam Freiha said in a statement.

Freiha started Blank Street in 2020 with Vinay Menda and Ignacio Llado Alvarez-Salas. Their first shop was a cart in the garden of Wythe Diner in Brooklyn's Williamsburg neighborhood, painted the sage green the chain still uses.

"It began as a purely practical decision, a color chosen so our original coffee carts would blend naturally into their first backdrops: the parks and backyard gardens of New York City," Freiha told WWD.

The company runs more than 100 shops across the U.S. and U.K., with a Boston University cafe on the way.

"L.A. has always been a dream for us, both personally and as a brand," Freiha told WWD. "This city sets an incredibly high bar for coffee and matcha and we didn't want to show up until we had lots of confidence that our brand and hospitality standards had evolved enough to meet and exceed people's expectations."

Blank Street raised $75 million in new funding from backers including General Atlantic, the private equity firm that owns Joe & the Juice. The Financial Times put the company's value at about $650 million, up from $500 million last year. A Beverly Hills cafe inside a historic Tudor Revival building comes next, and Freiha has named West Hollywood and Malibu as future stops.

Studio City customers get an exclusive drink, the Cortado Cloud. It comes with matcha or espresso under a vanilla bean sweet cream cloud.

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Blank Street will add ice cream by the end of the year. The company built the line with Zen Ong of Awan, an L.A. shop known for vegan, Indonesian-inspired flavors. The team based the four launch flavors on the drink menu: White Chocolate Matcha, Vanilla Bean Affogato, Mocha and Strawberry Shortcake Matcha. Blank Street wants the scoops to lift afternoon sales.

In 2022, Blank Street said it would open 10 D.C. shops within a year. That didn't happen, and a 14th Street NW cafe closed in January 2025.

Celebrity fans Sabrina Carpenter and Kendall Jenner have raised the chain's profile.

"You should never have to compromise on the most important part of your day, and for me that's my morning flat white," Freiha said.

Freiha's team plans to test that promise next in Beverly Hills.

Other recently opened Blank Street Coffee locations: