Why Surfboy matters.
Surfboy is a surf-inspired coffee shop where Bunker Hill's cultural district meets specialty coffee, fruit-driven smoothies and a coastal aesthetic tucked beneath California Plaza's towers.
Set within California Plaza near South Grand Avenue and just steps from MOCA Grand Avenue, the coffee shop occupies Bunker Hill between Angels Flight, The Broad and Walt Disney Concert Hall, with the Music Center extending north along Grand Avenue and the Financial District descending south beyond 4th Street. Arthur Erickson conceived California Plaza as interconnected towers, courtyards, stairways and escalators, and Surfboy sits inside that multilevel composition on the lower plaza. A compact counter makes coffee, matcha and smoothies the primary encounter, opening directly toward the plaza's outdoor seating. Surf references and a collection of Dodgers bobbleheads bring Southern California leisure culture into a corporate high-rise setting. The result is a small coffee bar whose concealed plaza position, outdoor spillover and beach-derived character create an unusually relaxed pocket within Bunker Hill's expansive architecture.
What defines Surfboy.
Surfboy is best known for bringing a surf-derived coffee concept into the lower level of California Plaza with espresso drinks, matcha, smoothies and breakfast burritos. The SURFBOY name was founded in October 2025 by Edgar Paul Gaona Cuellar. Gaona Cuellar had previously operated Sunburst Shack, a mobile food business whose commercial use began in 2020, establishing an earlier food-and-drink venture tied to the same owner and telephone number now associated with Surfboy. The café occupies California Plaza's lower commercial level alongside the interconnected office, dining and cultural uses spread through the Bunker Hill complex. Its compact food program concentrates on bacon and vegetarian breakfast burritos alongside pastries, giving the morning menu a narrow savory core beside the larger beverage selection. Seven smoothies named John John, Duke, Jett, Mick, Andy, Jack and Cole push the surfing reference directly into the menu.
Tres Leches Latte converts the milk-soaked dessert profile into espresso form, building sweetness and dairy richness around the coffee rather than treating flavoring as a peripheral addition. Shroom Latte takes the specialty program in another direction, joining Evergreen Latte, Mint Mocha Latte and Harmless Hippie Matcha Americano among the café's less conventional drinks. Matcha also appears in latte and Americano formats, giving the tea powder two constructions beside chai and brewed tea. Espresso service runs through cortado, cappuccino, flat white, mocha, café con leche, cold brew and drip coffee, keeping classical coffee formats underneath the more conspicuous specialty combinations. Bacon and vegetarian breakfast burritos provide the principal cooked counterpoint, with croissants, Danish pastries and muffins filling out the smaller pastry side. The combination gives Surfboy two distinct registers, a conventional espresso foundation and a lively layer of dessert-derived lattes, matcha variations and surf-named fruit drinks.
How Surfboy fits.
Surfboy works as the anchor for an outing connecting Bunker Hill's transformation into a contemporary arts district with a Japanese architect's first American museum commission, a collection built around postwar art and the concert hall that reshaped Grand Avenue's architectural profile.
Begin at The Broad, created by philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad to house a collection developed across five decades and now encompassing more than 2,000 works of postwar and contemporary art. Diller Scofidio + Renfro designed the building around a structural concept known as the veil and the vault, wrapping porous white exterior panels around galleries and the collection-storage core. The institution opened in 2015 after construction of the adjoining plaza and a new stretch of Grand Avenue cultural infrastructure. Works by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Barbara Kruger, Jeff Koons, Roy Lichtenstein, Cindy Sherman and Andy Warhol place major strands of late twentieth-century American art inside the collection. Continue to MOCA Grand Avenue, where Arata Isozaki completed his first American project in 1986 after entering the commission with an international reputation connected to Japan's Metabolist movement. Red sandstone, sunken galleries and pyramidal skylights gave the museum a deliberately horizontal presence beside the vertical redevelopment of Bunker Hill. The building emerged through the California Plaza development agreement, and its debut exhibition, Individuals: A Selected History of Contemporary Art, 1945-1986, extended across Grand Avenue and MOCA's existing Temporary Contemporary. Conclude at Walt Disney Concert Hall, set in motion by Lillian Disney's $50 million gift in 1987 and awarded to Frank Gehry through an architectural competition the following year. Sixteen years separated that gift from the hall's 2003 completion, with the project surviving a 1994 shutdown before fundraising revived construction. Yasuhisa Toyota developed the acoustics for the 2,265-seat auditorium, and Gehry collaborated with organ consultant Manuel Rosales on the later 6,125-pipe concert organ. The progression moves from a private contemporary-art collection made public through new architecture through a museum that helped establish Grand Avenue's cultural concentration and culminates inside the stainless-steel concert hall where architecture, acoustics and orchestral performance converge.
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