HOLLYWOOD — By seven on a Saturday morning the line is already forty people long, doubling back on itself down the sidewalk of a Thai Town block that, five years ago, had no line to speak of and no reason for one.
The draw is a small roastery and bakery on Hollywood Boulevard east of Western Avenue, a narrow shop that roasts its own coffee in the back and sells, out front, a short list of pastries that runs out most mornings before noon. It opened quietly in 2021. It did not stay quiet. Word moved the way it moves now, one photograph at a time, and the shop found itself the subject of a weekend pilgrimage it had never asked for.
The owners, a husband and wife who declined to give the shop’s takings but not their opinions, say they are still adjusting. “We wanted to roast good coffee and sell some bread. We did not plan on a line,” said Sarai Bhandari, who runs the front while her husband roasts. “Now people wait an hour. Some of them are lovely. Some of them are furious the cardamom buns are gone by ten. We make what we can make. We are two people and one oven.”
The line itself has become the event. Regulars have worked out its etiquette — where it forms, how it bends to leave the neighboring doorways clear, who is holding a place for a friend still parking. Vendors have noticed. A man sells cut fruit from a cart partway down the block on weekend mornings, timing his arrival to the queue, and the phone-repair shop next door reports that its own foot traffic has risen simply by proximity.
Not everyone on the block is charmed. The parking, always tight, has become a weekend contest. A resident two doors up said the early-morning chatter of the line carries straight into her bedroom, and that she has taken to sleeping with a fan on for the noise of it. “I’m glad they’re doing well,” she said, a little wearily. “I would be gladder if they did well more quietly.”
The neighborhood has been changing around the shop in any case. The Cahuenga night market, which began running this spring, has brought weekend crowds to the wider area, and merchants who spent the lean years of the production slump watching foot traffic thin now find themselves, cautiously, busy again.
Whether the line lasts is another question. Food fashions are fickle, and a shop that is beloved this year can be forgotten the next. The owners seem clear-eyed about it. They have resisted expanding, resisted a second location, resisted, so far, the advice of everyone who has told them how to make more of the moment.
On a recent Saturday the last cardamom bun went at 10:20, to a woman who had driven from Pasadena and waited fifty minutes for it. She ate it standing on the sidewalk, unhurried, while the line behind her rearranged its hopes toward the croissants, and the roaster in the back started another batch that would be gone, in its turn, well before the morning was.