LA's Broken All-Night Coffee Shop Scene

Never there when you need it. Photo by martinca via Flickr.

Los Angeles, for all that it has to offer the late night set in the way of tacos, deli meats, dancing, and beautifully vacant streets, can’t seem to find it in its heart to make a goddamn chai latte past 11pm. Why? There are more than enough night-owl neurotics with script deadlines (or even term papers due) that you’d think every third Starbucks would be open around the clock. Yet there are vast swaths of our fine city that go dark to couture coffee culture once the clock chimes over to a new day.

This may be splitting hairs, but it sure feels like there is a sustainable subgroup of folks who don’t want to sit at a diner, slugging down pitch-black Folgers just because it’s the only 2am option. A recent scouring of Mid-City / Mid-Wilshire / Miracle Mile turned up nothing past 11pm, with the nearby Insomnia Cafe on Beverly kindly keeping the lights on until 1am. But that’s still normal awake time for many of us (especially here at LAist), so why shut down when we folks start to need your services the most?

After some *ahem* extensive research, only the LA Cafe downtown and Crave Cafe in Sherman Oaks popped up as scrumptious 24-hour suitors for our common late night more-than-just-caffeine fix. A small but hearty group chooses to stay open until 2am (including Franklin Village’s Bourgeois Pig and the Starbucks at LA Live), but shouldn’t there be more? Sound off in the comments if you’ve shared similarly frustrating experiences, or if you know of a sweet spot we’re overlooking for those 3am Americanos.