You would think a chef who used to run a three-Michelin-starred restaurant and one of Los Angeles’s most celebrated modern Korean hot spots would draw more attention after taking over the menu of a chain of West Coast coffee shops. That’s what Katianna
Hong, previously at Napa Valley’s Restaurant at Meadowood, has been up to since temporarily closing her Los Angeles Arts District restaurant, Yangban. Earlier this year, Hong completely revamped the food at Verve Coffee Roasters, a chain based in Santa Cruz with outposts in Los Angeles, the Bay Area, and Tokyo.
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A few months ago, Hong cooked through the entire menu for me, showing layers of thoughtful flavors, fine dining–level ingredients, and Michelin precision in salads, toasts, and other coffee-friendly fare that might otherwise go unnoticed. The new lineup could post a meaningful challenge to something like Erewhon’s grab-and-go section, which also features wraps, breakfast burritos, sandwiches, and toasts.
Last year, Verve’s menu was Spartan: avocado toast, chicken Caesar ciabatta, roasted corn tartine, overnight oats, and chia seed pudding. All fairly standard Los Angeles cafe fare.
Verve partner Mike Glick, whose prolific Sprout LA restaurant group operates Vespertine, Broken Spanish Comedor, Camélia, Yangban, and many others, tapped Hong to apply her kitchen leadership and recipe skills to the lineup. The role’s work-life balance appealed to Hong: She and her husband, John, often alternated nights cooking at Yangban and spending time with their daughter (a routine that will likely return once Yangban reopens on the Westside).
Hong’s mission was to grow the menu so it could perform all day while continuing to be assembled by baristas — not necessarily by trained line cooks. Hong employed the sizeable commissary kitchen at Verve’s Arts District location to handle the deep prep: salads with uniformly chopped vegetables lined up like artwork, mango and coconut–infused chia seed pudding with macadamia nut granola, pork sausage ground in house and slathered with smoky aioli. Everything consistent, balanced, and made by Verve staff (except for the breads and pastries, sourced from the highly rated Jyan Isaac Bakery in Santa Monica). I swooned over the burger featuring a CD-sized disc of crispy cheese, as well as over the roasted tahini toast studded with candied dates. I sampled virtually every bite on the menu, taking home samples of the prepared foods and eating them over three days; they all fared well in the fridge. These are upper-tier cafe dishes that you can come back to every week.
A recent visit to Manhattan Beach shows chain-wide consistency is still a work in progress. The Asian chicken salad was superb, as good as a $25 dollar salad in Beverly Hills, as was the tea leaf salad. The flavors in the spiced chicken wrap felt disjointed (I prefer the gochujang barley wrap), while the hot smoked trout crumbled over an everything bagel didn’t come with a lemon wedge to help freshen the bites. It might’ve been an off day. It’s hard to adhere so much ambition to a group of coffee shops that isn’t used to serving this much food. But the promise is there, and I trust Hong can smooth things out.
Restaurant players in Los Angeles have started to catch on to what Hong has been doing. Chef Mei Lin, previously of Nightshade and 88 Club, likes everything, whether it’s the Arts District–only breakfast burrito filled with crispy tots and a smear of refried beans, or the tea leaf salad. Chef Ray Garcia of Broken Spanish Comedor told me over DM that the new dishes are “way better than they need to be for a coffee shop” and thinks the cheddar puffs are “dangerously good.” Kato co-owner Ryan Bailey favors the Turkish eggs and sesame shrimp toast (the latter is only available in the Arts District as well). Compared to the milquetoast offerings at Erewhon, Verve’s zesty fare lives up to its name.
