Why Honeybee's matters.
Honeybee's is a family-founded coffee shop where Belmont Heights' residential character meets Cambodian culinary influence, neighborhood-scale hospitality and a corner market reworked around coffee and food.
Set along Loma Avenue near East 3rd Street and just steps from Temple Israel, the coffee shop occupies a residential corner between the Broadway commercial corridor and East 4th Street, with Belmont Shore and the Pacific coast to the south, Recreation Park to the northeast and Colorado Lagoon opening toward Alamitos Bay farther east. Tall front windows bring daylight across the compact corner room, with the former market footprint retaining the proportions of a small neighborhood shop. Counter service places coffee, tea and prepared food within a single ordering sequence, preserving the immediacy of the original one-stop concept. A rear patio extends the small interior beyond its street-facing room, creating a second setting removed from the active service counter. The result is a closely scaled Belmont Heights coffee shop whose corner-store proportions, daylight, counter service and residential surroundings preserve the intimate character of its neighborhood origins.
What defines Honeybee's.
Honeybee's is best known for Jackson and Mareni Khem's conversion of the former Henry Market into a family-run coffee shop after taking over the Belmont Heights corner store in 2016. The couple completed much of the renovation themselves, removing crowded retail shelving and building a service counter, food-preparation area and seating into a property that had functioned as a traditional neighborhood market. Jackson Khem spent his early months behind the counter listening to nearby residents and learned that coffee and sandwiches were the strongest requests for the property. Honeybee's opened in May 2016 with that community feedback shaping the new operation, then quickly broadened its early sandwich program with tea, smoothies and other drinks. The Roast Beef Dip and Italian became early best sellers, both built on toasted French baguettes, and Honeybee's Special Iced Coffee gave the fledgling shop a condensed-milk coffee preparation tied more closely to the Khem family's Southeast Asian background. The business name came from the middle name of Jackson and Mareni's daughter, turning the family connection into the public name of the shop. By 2017, the Khems were operating Honeybee's as both a coffee shop and market, having transformed an aging corner store into a food-focused business through direct engagement with the surrounding neighborhood.
Cambodian preparations now give the menu another distinct culinary dimension, led by a dedicated group of coffees finished with flavored cream foams. Cambodian Coconut Cream Coffee pairs the coffee base with coconut cream foam, with ube, banana and durian versions extending the series through ingredients closely associated with Southeast Asian sweets and fruit cookery. The savory program reaches Cambodia through a sandwich combining house-marinated lemongrass beef with pickled carrots and daikon, cucumber, jalapeño and cilantro on French bread. A separate group of vermicelli bowls uses mint, fried scallions, crushed peanuts and house vinaigrette, with the 3rd and Loma Bowl combining shrimp and pork as a preparation named directly for the shop's corner. Spring rolls carry the same culinary direction through rice-paper wrappers, vermicelli and combinations including pork, shrimp and lemongrass beef. Ceremonial matcha forms another concentrated drink program, with banana, ube, coconut and durian cream foams connecting the tea selection to flavors already developed across the Cambodian coffee series.
How Honeybee's fits.
Honeybee's works as the anchor for an outing connecting an eccentric Depression-era house with the engineered transformation of Long Beach's coastal wetlands and the Olympic rowing course that carried that work onto an international stage.
Begin at Skinny House, the Tudor Revival residence Newton Rummond completed in 1932 on a parcel measuring just 10 by 50 feet after receiving the land as repayment for a $100 debt. Rummond accepted a wager that a habitable residence could be built on the narrow parcel and produced an 860-square-foot house rising three stories, with Depression-era craftsmen contributing to its construction. Ripley's Believe It or Not later featured the building as America's thinnest house, and Long Beach designated it as a historic property in 1983, preserving one of the city's most unconventional responses to constrained residential land. Continue to Colorado Lagoon, a surviving portion of the Los Cerritos Wetlands complex that once encompassed 2,400 acres across East Long Beach. Long Beach acquired the area as part of Recreation Park in 1923, and a bulkhead and tide gate installed in 1929 altered its connection with Alamitos Bay so water depths would support high diving. A multistory diving platform subsequently supported the 1932 Olympic Trials, linking the lagoon's reshaped shoreline to the city's preparations for international competition. Later changes included replacement of the open tidal channel with a 900-foot underground culvert in the 1960s, a modification that restricted circulation and reshaped the lagoon's ecological condition for decades. Conclude at Marine Stadium, created by dredging the Alamitos Bay estuary and extended for the rowing events of the 1932 Olympic Games. The finished course became the first manmade Olympic rowing course in the United States, with enough width for four crews to race abreast and a 2,000-meter competition distance that drew 121,000 spectators across five days of racing. Its competitive history continued with the 1968 and 1976 United States men's Olympic rowing trials and the 1984 women's trials, extending the waterway's role across successive generations of American rowing. The progression moves from a Depression-era residential experiment through the engineered remaking of a coastal lagoon and culminates at an Olympic course whose scale placed Long Beach's aquatic development within international sporting history.
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