By CHRISTIAN MONTERROSA | Reporter
With more and more coffee shops sprouting throughout Pacific Palisades, it can be hard to navigate the caffeine-filled sea. While some may prefer the charter boat option that Starbucks and Coffee Bean successfully provide, others look for a more refined vehicle to get their morning fix.
Filling that void—and giving customers a tri-deck mega yacht equivalent cup of coffee—Caffe Luxxe has found a formula to both cater to people with refined palates and newcomers.
Best friends since their college years at USC, Mark Wain and Gary Chau have opened five locations throughout Los Angeles County—with a sixth one on the way—and have quickly risen to the top of a saturated coffee market.
Their Palisadian location held a grand opening just three months ago on May 1.
“We were trying to open in the Palisades, actually before we opened in Brentwood back in [2008] and we had called on a couple of properties,” said Wain in an exclusive interview with the Palisadian-Post. However, they found it challenging due to the rare business space and people waiting to cash in on the inevitable Caruso boom.
“Every couple of years we’d call and try to find another spot in the Palisades,” he said. “We’re just really excited to be there.
“The decision was primarily based around who our customers are. Our company is family and community oriented and the Palisades is a family- and community-oriented neighborhood.”
Wain and Chau fully devoted themselves to their now mini-empire after Wain walked away from his tech career with Microsoft and Chau left behind a marketing position with Bacardi, a global spirits company.
While leaving behind such lucrative jobs might raise an eyebrow or two, it only takes a few minutes of speaking with the two coffee experts—and a tour of their Gardena warehouse—to understand why they had to do it.
“Mark and I left the big corporate world on purpose,” Chau said. “Because we walked away from that lifestyle of being on a plane all of the time, working all of the time … and being treated as a number.
“So we always promised ourselves that we would always want to work with people who we enjoy being with because to us it’s about being a family and then that sense of family extends to the communities where our cafes are too.”
When Palisadian customers step into the newest Caffe Luxxe on Sunset Boulevard, they are greeted by a friendly barista who masterfully pours intricate latte art. But behind the scenes, Wain and Chau have perfected the process of global coffee bean acquisition and fine-tuned bean roasting.
They have traveled the world in search of the right beans and have contributed greatly to sustainable practices by coffee farmers, often paying higher prices for the benefit of the workers who, in some countries, are paid close to $1 an hour.
“[The farmers] are dependent on us and we’re dependent on them, as opposed to them just hoping that we’re going to buy their coffee,” Wain said. “So it becomes something where we’re partners with them and when we do well, they do well, as opposed to just this transactional thing.”
Once the raw beans make it back to their warehouse and are roasted at a predetermined time for the best taste, the international beans undergo the art of “cupping,” a process used to define the flavor and fine tune the roasting process.
Such a test is not for those with a faint sense of smell and taste, as your nose is constantly smelling the coffee at different extraction points.
The coffee is smelled right after the beans are ground, again when you pour hot water over it and a final time after the foamy head is pushed aside to reach the underlying coffee. Finally, the freshly brewed coffee is slurped with a spoon so that it spreads to the back of the tongue.
If you’re overwhelmed by that process, don’t worry, that’s what Wain and Chau have perfected over the years so you don’t have to.
“What I would love is for people to also connect and understand and appreciate what we’re doing cause that’s a lot of education,” Chau said. “To realize, ‘Oh wow, coffee doesn’t just come in a can,’ it’s an actual natural agricultural product that’s grown by people … and so we do our best to try and educate people, but that takes the whole coffee industry to be able to do that.”
The refined method and process used by Caffe Luxxe is the carefully crafted marriage of science and art for the delight of the tongue and should be considered as such when contemplating what sets it apart from a warm cup of water with coffee grinds floating around in it.
While the pair of coffee kings aren’t out to create a large monopoly of businesses, their customer base and Palisadian popularity continues to grow as the word gets out that a consistently great experience is available in The Village.
“I see the future of Caffe Luxxe the same as the present of Caffe Luxxe,” Wain said. “We’re not out to be the biggest, we just want to be the best at what we do and we want to contribute positively to every neighborhood that we serve.
“That’s what we’re doing now and that’s what we want to continue to do.”
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