Why Nature's Brew matters.
Nature's Brew is a homegrown café where University Park's collegiate energy meets the Kronfli brothers' USC-born hospitality enterprise, Lior Hillel's Mediterranean cooking and an unusually serious in-house coffee-roasting program.
Set along South Union Avenue near West 23rd Street and just west of the University of Southern California, the café occupies University Park between the campus edge, the residential streets extending toward Hoover Street and the historic West Adams corridor to the north. The storefront preserves the broad, open configuration Danny and Robert Kronfli created when they converted the former Ragazzi Room in 2013. High ceilings give the narrow commercial interior enough volume for communal tables, counter seating and prolonged daytime use. A Pavetto coffee roaster occupies the room as working equipment, placing production within the same setting where drinks are prepared and served. The result is a neighborhood café whose physical openness supports the social role the founders originally envisioned for the blocks surrounding their alma mater.
What defines Nature's Brew.
Nature's Brew is best known for emerging from the same USC-centered partnership that grew an apartment supper club into one of Los Angeles' expanding independent restaurant groups. Robert Kronfli began Paladar Underground during his sophomore year at USC, turning weekly dinners in his off-campus apartment into a supper club substantial enough to inspire a documentary that screened at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2013. Robert subsequently joined his older brother Danny, another USC alumnus, in Bacaro L.A., where chef Lior Hillel became their culinary partner. Hillel grew up in Israel, pursued culinary and baking education before further training in Southern California, and worked at Jean-Georges in New York under a team that included culinary-development director Gregory Brainin. When the Ragazzi Room closed near Bacaro in 2012, the partners acquired the premises and redesigned them as a more open daytime restaurant built around coffee, fresh food and baked goods. Nature's Brew opened July 6, 2013 with the Kronflis, Hillel and general manager Noa Sztar operating the new business. Its first coffee program drew beans from Intelligentsia and local roaster Pasquini, and house baking extended to bread produced on-site twice each day. Hillel simultaneously experimented with en papillote meals combining chicken or fish with grains and seasonings including harissa, cured lemon, basil and sun-dried tomato butter, giving the café a culinary scope beyond its espresso counter. Nature's Brew subsequently became part of a larger group encompassing Bacari restaurants and the partners' packaged sauce business, which grew from condiments developed in Hillel's kitchens. The café later brought roasting inside the storefront through a Pavetto machine, shifting coffee production from outside suppliers to organic espresso, dark and decaffeinated roasts produced on the premises. More than thirteen years after its debut, Nature's Brew remains on the same Union Avenue block where the partners' restaurant enterprise took shape, preserving a direct connection between the Kronflis' USC beginnings and the hospitality group that followed.
Organic coffee beans rotate inside the café's Pavetto roaster before grinding and extraction, giving the shop control over roast development as well as the final drink. The medium espresso roast supplies both conventional milk drinks and Vietnamese sweet coffee, where condensed milk converts the concentrated coffee into a colder, denser preparation. Cold brew takes the same emphasis on coffee production in another direction through a 24-hour steep, drawing flavor without espresso pressure or hot-water extraction. Hillel's kitchen builds complementary intensity through slow cooking, pickling and house sauces rooted in his Mediterranean background. Beef brisket receives a 24-hour slow roast before pickled red onion cuts through its richness and mint-cilantro-walnut pesto adds herbs and nuttiness. Roasted eggplant, sweet-spiced yams, bell pepper, pickled beets and kale tahini construct a meatless sandwich around char, sweetness, acidity and sesame, extending an ingredient Hillel has singled out as central to his cooking. Turkey undergoes slow cooking followed by brûléeing, producing a browned exterior before chimichurri and lemon-garlic aioli supply herbs, fat and acid. Pastries enter the ovens twice daily, maintaining the original emphasis on fresh baking alongside the newer roasting operation. Roasting, long cooking, pickling and fresh baking give Nature's Brew a production logic extending well beyond beverage assembly, connecting the coffee counter to the culinary training behind the larger Bacari family.
How Nature's Brew fits.
Nature's Brew works as the morning anchor for an outing connecting an early university art museum, among Southern California's defining collegiate buildings and a museum complex whose origins reach to the transformation of an agricultural fairground into Exposition Park.
Begin at USC Fisher Museum of Art, created through Elizabeth Holmes Fisher's 1937 gift to the University of Southern California and dedicated on November 14, 1939. Fisher stipulated free public admission and ultimately donated 74 paintings, drawings and sculptures between 1939 and 1951. Her holdings encompassed Hudson River School and Barbizon landscapes, British portraiture and Dutch and Flemish work from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. Architect Ralph Flewelling designed the museum and neighboring Harris Hall as a coordinated composition of buildings and courtyards along the southern campus edge. Continue to Doheny Memorial Library, completed in 1932 after oil magnate Edward L. Doheny's family financed the building in memory of his son, Edward L. Doheny Jr. Pasadena architect Samuel Lunden developed the interiors and final working drawings, and construction from groundbreaking to dedication took only twelve months. Its pale Roman brick, cream limestone, colored marble and grouped arches draw from northern Italian Romanesque architecture. Placing the four-story library 270 feet from the former University Avenue created a central quadrangle facing Bovard Administration Building and helped establish the architectural order of the expanding campus. Conclude at Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, whose site had belonged to Agricultural Park before civic reformers pushed for its conversion into a cultural district. Frank Hudson and William A.D. Munsell designed the original museum, and its cornerstone was laid in December 1910. The building combined Spanish Renaissance ornament, Romanesque arches and a Beaux-Arts plan around a 75-foot rotunda lined with Italian marble and crowned by Walter Horace Judson's stained-glass skylight. When the museum opened on November 6, 1913, its collections drew from the Historical Society of Southern California, Cooper Ornithological Club, Southern California Academy of Sciences and Fine Arts League. The institution also received exclusive rights that year to recover prehistoric remains from the Rancho La Brea tar pits. The progression moves from Fisher's privately financed vision for publicly accessible art through USC's architectural maturation and culminates at the 1913 museum that helped convert a former fairground into one of Los Angeles' principal cultural districts.
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