Why Urth Caffe Beverly Hills matters.
Urth Caffé is a characterful organic café where Beverly Hills' South Beverly Drive dining district meets Jilla and Shallom Berkman's heirloom-coffee philosophy, a preserved 1930s cottage and the residential warmth of one of the company's most architecturally distinctive branches.
Set along South Beverly Drive near Gregory Way and south of Wilshire Boulevard, the café occupies a low-rise commercial corridor where restaurants and neighborhood businesses form the southern extension of Beverly Hills' principal shopping district. The 1936 building retains its red-brick exterior, tiled roof, divided-light windows and original doors, preserving the cottage proportions that attracted the Berkmans to the property. Lead architect Victor Corona enlarged the roof-gable window and added clerestory glazing, bringing more daylight into an interior finished with deep mahogany, raised-panel woodwork and handcrafted detailing. A brick fireplace anchors the main dining room beneath a tile mosaic designed by Jilla Berkman, and a mural depicting the Entsu Estate tea fields in Wazuka extends the interior toward another part of Urth's agricultural world. The result is a Beverly Hills café whose preserved domestic architecture and carefully inserted craftsmanship give a large, heavily trafficked operation the physical character of a converted neighborhood home.
What defines Urth Caffe.
Urth Caffé is best known for Jilla and Shallom Berkman building an American coffee company around organic heirloom beans years before those terms became fixtures of specialty-coffee culture. Their direction changed in 1989 after meeting coffee agronomist Jorge Cebreros, who was working with a certified organic, sustainable estate in Chanchamayo, Peru and taught the couple about Typica, an heirloom Arabica cultivated under rainforest canopy at elevations exceeding 5,000 feet. The Berkmans spent several years learning roasting and brewing before launching an exclusively organic heirloom coffee operation, naming Urth from an old Welsh root spelling of Earth and pairing it with the Italian word Caffé. Their first physical coffeehouse opened in 1991 inside a 300-square-foot Manhattan Beach storefront where coffee and tea canisters crowded bookshelves and walls as the business developed an early following. Expansion moved Urth to Melrose Avenue in 1994, where the Berkmans converted Shallom's grandfather Al Berkman's former singing school and recording studio into a larger café and added breakfast, lunch and dinner. That same year, the Berkmans collaborated with Finca Irlanda in Chiapas, Mexico, adding another pioneering certified-organic estate to their coffee supply relationships. An Italian executive chef joined the company in 1997 and brought production of ancient-grain breads and desserts in-house, widening Urth beyond roasting and beverages into the bakery-and-café format associated with the company afterward. Beverly Hills became the next major chapter in 2003, giving Urth its second surviving Los Angeles-area branch before Santa Monica, Downtown, Pasadena and later expansion carried the company across Southern California and beyond. Coffee production eventually consolidated at the company's Hawthorne roasting facility, commissary and bakery, supporting direct relationships with producers across Africa, Japan and South America as the business that began with one Peruvian agronomist developed into a multi-location operation.
Spanish Latté carries one of Urth's earliest proprietary preparations into the contemporary beverage program, combining heirloom organic espresso with a sweeter, creamier milk profile derived from a drink the Berkmans created in 1994 after inspiration from coffee in Barcelona. Caffé Pistacchio takes espresso in a more layered direction through house pistachio butter made from organic Sicilian pistachios, pistachio milk and ceremonial Wazuka matcha, allowing roasted coffee, nut fat and green tea to develop across the same drink. Matcha receives its own preparation from Wazuka in Kyoto Prefecture, linking the beverage program to Akihiro Nakai's Entsu Estate and a producer relationship maintained across decades. Eggs Salmone builds breakfast around sprouted ancient-grain bread layered with lemon mascarpone, avocado, natural smoked salmon, wild arugula and poached eggs before capers, dill and chopped salsa supply acidity and herbal lift. Poach Di Parma shifts the same bread tradition toward toasted ancient-grain ciabatta carrying garlic-truffle aioli, wild mushrooms, Prosciutto di Parma, poached eggs, arugula, Reggiano Parmesan and sage butter, concentrating earthy, cured and nutty flavors against the bread's grain structure. Natural Beef Hash moves into slow braising through short rib folded into heirloom potatoes, peppers, onions and parsley beneath poached eggs, tomato, basil oil and Reggiano, showing how Urth's kitchen extends its sourcing philosophy from coffee into composed café cooking built around identifiable grains, produce and proteins.
How Urth Caffe fits.
Urth Caffé works as the anchor for a Beverly Hills outing connecting the vanished movie palace that introduced theatrical performance to the young city, a surviving Zigzag Moderne cinema by one of the West Coast's prolific theater architects and a technologically ambitious fountain created during Beverly Hills' interwar civic expansion.
Begin at the former site of Beverly Theatre, the city's first purpose-built movie house and a striking example of how quickly cinema became intertwined with Beverly Hills' development. Realtor Daniel Quinlan commissioned theater specialist Lewis Arthur Smith to design the 1,270-seat building in 1924, and it opened the following year with vaudeville, films and an opening-night movie tour of nearby stars' homes. Smith mixed Near Eastern and Asian references across an onion-domed exterior, Arabian Nights murals, ornamental elephants and a moon-gate-shaped proscenium, creating an architecture of fantasy for audiences living beside the emerging film industry. Fox West Coast later operated the house, and its post-cinema life included a Fiorucci boutique before demolition in 2005. Continue east to Fine Arts Theatre, opened as the Regina and designed by B. Marcus Priteca, the architect responsible for more than 150 West Coast theaters and the Pantages circuit's houses between 1910 and 1929. Priteca gave the Wilshire Boulevard building a Zigzag Moderne façade organized through stepped setbacks, geometric ornament, a neon marquee and a vertical blade sign. The theater was renamed Fine Arts in 1948, tying its later character to the specialized exhibition of cinema as Beverly Hills' larger movie palaces disappeared or changed use. A restoration returned the exterior to its Deco character before the house reopened as the Cecchi Gori Fine Arts Theatre in 1993. Its survival makes the building an architectural counterpoint to the lost Beverly Theatre only blocks away. Conclude at Electric Fountain, inaugurated in 1931 at the convergence of Wilshire and Santa Monica boulevards on land donated by the Rodeo Land and Water Company. Architect Ralph Carlin Flewelling designed the fountain with sculptor Robert Merrell Gage, whose kneeling Tongva figure rises above a thirty-foot pool. Funding came from the Beverly Hills Woman's Club, with Harold Lloyd's mother contributing to the civic gift, and colored illumination transformed the water into a nighttime performance at what was then a comparatively open western gateway to the city. The sculptural program references Rancho Rodeo de las Aguas, the earlier landholding whose Spanish name translates to “gathering of the waters.” Restoration completed in 2016 renewed the water and lighting effects more than eight decades after the fountain's inauguration. The progression moves from a vivacious lost movie palace through a surviving Art Deco cinema and culminates in interwar civic art that transformed water, light and regional history into a ceremonial western entrance to Beverly Hills.
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