Los Angeles for digital nomads

Best cafes

Downtown Los Angeles is a coffee city that never quite decided what kind of coffee city it wanted to be, and that is the whole appeal. Inside a roughly two-mile radius bounded by Union Station, Little Tokyo, the Arts District, and the Financial Core, you can drink a matcha in a shopping arcade, a French press in a bakery run by pastry-school graduates, an Ethiopian pour-over in a converted warehouse, and a $6 drip that a Wall Street analyst would recognize on sight. The list below is arranged for a walking day, not a ranking of taste: each of these twelve rooms opens onto a different piece of downtown, and each earns its place by doing one thing with unusual conviction. Skip the Highland Park pilgrimage; on a first visit downtown holds enough range to fill a notebook. Bring cash for the counter-service places, patience for the ones that only accept mobile orders, and a light jacket for the ones that keep the door open all afternoon.