Why The Coffee Company matters.
The Coffee Company is a steadfast breakfast restaurant where Westchester's aviation-oriented neighborhood character meets a family-operated daytime institution, high-volume griddle cooking and the enduring Los Angeles tradition of the independent coffee shop.
Set along La Tijera Boulevard at Sepulveda Eastway and just northeast of Los Angeles International Airport, the restaurant occupies a low-rise commercial pocket between Westchester's residential grid, airport-oriented businesses and the major traffic corridors feeding Sepulveda Boulevard. A broad corner storefront places the dining room behind long street-facing windows, giving the interior substantially more daylight than the enclosed booths associated with older roadside diners. Closely arranged tables accommodate the restaurant's heavy breakfast traffic, with a straightforward service layout built around rapid turnover through the morning and lunch periods. An outdoor dining area extends the operation beyond the primary room and gives the compact neighborhood restaurant additional capacity during its busiest daytime hours. The result is an unfussy breakfast room whose physical organization suits both Westchester regulars and travelers moving through the airport district.
What defines The Coffee Company.
The Coffee Company is best known for sustaining a family-operated Westchester breakfast and lunch restaurant through decades of extraordinary change around Los Angeles International Airport. Gus Kazemi has become the principal figure associated with the business, appearing as its owner through the LAX Coastal Chamber of Commerce and as president of Zina Coffee Company, Inc., the corporate operation doing business as The Coffee Company. Commercial business histories trace the enterprise into the 1980s, giving the restaurant a lineage that predates the specialty-coffee boom that subsequently transformed café culture across Los Angeles. Its longevity is particularly consequential in Westchester, where airport expansion during the 1960s and 1970s eliminated 3,500 homes and displaced 10,000 residents, severely weakening the surrounding retail district before local property owners began rebuilding its commercial base. The restaurant ultimately developed a dual constituency created by that geography: neighborhood patrons formed its recurring customer base, and proximity to the airport brought a continuing population of travelers through the dining room. That relationship became explicit enough for the family to define the business around serving both local customers and people traveling or moving quickly through the airport district. A 2024 LAist food feature brought Alex Cottrell and How to LA host Brian De Los Santos to the restaurant during an exploration of food around LAX, placing the independent breakfast room within a broader account of the airport area's culinary culture. The operation remained firmly family-run in 2026, when its own recruitment material characterized the restaurant as a four-decade community business and sought cooks for a high-volume daytime kitchen. That continuity gives The Coffee Company significance beyond its menu: an independent Westchester restaurant has persisted through airport growth, neighborhood commercial disruption and several generations of Los Angeles dining culture.
Shrimp and grits move the kitchen well beyond the narrow expectations attached to a neighborhood coffee shop, setting seasoned shellfish against soft ground corn for a breakfast plate built around the contrast between briny sweetness and creamy grain. Chicken-fried steak takes the griddle tradition in a heavier direction, pairing crisp breaded beef with eggs and the restaurant's substantial morning sides so crust, gravy and yolk carry the plate. French toast shifts that emphasis toward custard-soaked bread browned on the cooking surface, creating a soft interior beneath caramelized edges before syrup adds another layer of sweetness. Belgian waffles provide a different structure through deep pockets and a lighter interior, particularly when paired with thick applewood-smoked bacon whose salt and smoke cut through the sweeter batter. House biscuits supply another recurring foundation, bringing a tender baked element into combinations ranging from eggs and breakfast meat to gravy-centered plates. The Coffee Company's kitchen preserves the abundance of the American breakfast restaurant through griddle work, frying, baking and Southern-influenced preparations, giving a daytime neighborhood institution considerably more culinary range than its name suggests.
How The Coffee Company fits.
The Coffee Company works as the anchor for a Westchester outing connecting a vivacious postwar movie palace, among Southern California's finest surviving Googie coffee shops and the Space Age structure created as the architectural symbol of Los Angeles International Airport.
Begin at Loyola Theater, opened by Fox West Coast Theatres on October 3, 1946 as one of the early buildings in Westchester's developing Sepulveda Boulevard commercial district. Clarence J. Smale designed its extraordinary exterior, with Carl G. Moeller credited for the interior and a swan-neck tower rising nearly sixty feet above the marquee. The opening program featured Three Little Girls in Blue, starring June Haver, George Montgomery, Vivian Blaine and Celeste Holm. Film exhibition continued until 1982, the same year Los Angeles designated the building a Historic-Cultural Monument; conversion to offices subsequently removed its tower and marquee but retained substantial portions of Smale's flowing façade. Continue to Pann's Coffee Shop, opened by George and Rena Poulos in 1958 inside a building by Armet & Davis with Helen Liu Fong. Its immense hovering roof, angled neon sign, terrazzo, flagstone, tropical planting and broad plate-glass walls represent the California coffee-shop architecture that made the firm synonymous with Googie design. Louis Armet and Eldon Davis had established their practice in 1947 and went on to produce thousands of buildings, but Pann's survives as one of their strongest intact restaurant commissions. Second-generation owner Jim Poulos restored the property in 1993, work subsequently recognized with a Los Angeles Conservancy Preservation Award. Conclude at Theme Building, the surviving architectural emblem of the airport transformation that fundamentally altered Westchester. Its conceptual origin reaches Pereira and Luckman's 1953 airport master plan, which imagined a far larger glass-domed central terminal connected to satellite facilities by enclosed bridges. The scheme was radically reduced as LAX adopted terminals arranged around a U-shaped roadway, leaving the central structure primarily as a visual symbol. Paul Revere Williams and Welton Becket joined Pereira and Luckman within the architectural team associated with the finished Space Age design, completed in 1961 with sweeping parabolic forms that appear to suspend its central volume above the ground. Los Angeles designated the structure a Historic-Cultural Monument in 1993, formally protecting the architectural emblem of the jet-age airport beside the neighborhood transformed by its expansion. The progression moves from a postwar movie palace built for Westchester's emerging commercial center through Googie restaurant architecture calibrated to Southern California automobile culture and culminates in the futuristic airport symbol that announced Los Angeles' entry into the jet age.
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