Why Urth Caffé matters.
Urth Caffé is a pioneering organic coffeehouse where the Arts District's warehouse culture meets Jilla and Shallom Berkman's heirloom-coffee enterprise, European café traditions and a flagship operation built around roasting, baking and culinary production.
Set along South Hewitt Street near East 5th Street and just west of the Los Angeles River, the café occupies a former industrial property amid the Arts District's brick warehouses, converted lofts and historic freight infrastructure. Architect Victor Corona preserved the building's original bow-truss ceiling and skylights, exposing the structural volume above the dining room. A raised outdoor patio extends beneath a clock tower, with locally hand-painted Art Deco tilework carrying across the tower, brick façades and interior fireplace. Large interior windows open views toward active bakery and culinary work areas, turning production into part of the architectural encounter. The result is an industrial café whose restored warehouse shell, decorative tilework and public-facing production rooms connect contemporary coffeehouse culture directly to the Arts District's manufacturing fabric.
What defines Urth Caffé.
Urth Caffé is best known for Jilla and Shallom Berkman building an exclusively organic, heirloom-coffee company from a 1989 encounter with Peruvian coffee agronomist Jorge Cebreros. The couple had been operating a small mail-order company devoted to natural household products when Cebreros connected them with an organic estate in Peru's Chanchamayo region and introduced them to Typica, an heirloom Arabica cultivar grown beneath the rainforest canopy at elevations exceeding 5,000 feet. The Berkmans spent the following years learning coffee roasting and brewing before opening their first café in Manhattan Beach in 1991. Their sourcing program expanded in 1994 through collaboration with Finca Irlanda in Chiapas, Mexico, an early certified-organic coffee estate whose shade-grown agriculture gave Urth another heirloom supply relationship. That same year the company moved its café operation to Melrose Avenue, and in 1997 an Italian executive chef joined the business to establish in-house ancient-grain bread and dessert production. Beverly Hills followed in 2003 and Santa Monica in 2004 as the company developed from a coffee specialist into a broader café group. By 2005, the Berkmans had outgrown their central kitchen, bakery and roasting facility near the Los Angeles Convention Center and began searching for industrial property, initially concentrating on Vernon. KOR Development subsequently offered them the 13,000-square-foot former Holland Egg Products warehouse in the Arts District at below-market cost on the condition that a café operate there for five years. Jilla Berkman rejected the original plan for a minimal training café and pushed the property toward flagship status, leading to the Downtown opening on November 19, 2008. The site consolidated coffee roasting, tea blending, baking, cooking and administrative functions within the same operation, making the Arts District property both a public café and the production center behind Urth's continued expansion.
Urth Italia supplies the espresso foundation for several of the café's most recognizable drinks, including a cold brew extracted in-house for twenty-four hours to develop its chocolate-toned character and a nitrogen-infused version whose dissolved gas produces a dense foamed head. The Spanish Latté traces to an Urth formulation created in 1994, combining espresso with a sweeter, creamier milk profile before the Spanish Latté Granita converts the same idea into a blended frozen drink. Caffé Quadra concentrates the opposite end of the espresso program through multiple ristretto shots, shortening extraction to build intensity inside a milk drink. Wazuka ceremonial-grade matcha expands the beverage program beyond coffee through a Japanese preparation whisked by hand, then reappears beside espresso and dark chocolate in the Rising Sun Matcha Latté. Divine Spice Chai takes another route through a caffeine-free herbal blend steamed with milk and honey, and Moroccan Mint Latté joins organic green tea with mint and milk. Across coffee and tea, the program repeatedly alters extraction, aeration, temperature and concentration, twenty-four-hour cold brewing, nitrogen infusion, ristretto espresso, hand-whisked matcha and blended ice, to produce drinks whose distinctions come from preparation as much as flavoring.
How Urth Caffé fits.
Urth Caffé works as the anchor for an Arts District outing connecting an early reinforced-concrete freight terminal, a Depression-era river crossing engineered around rail traffic and a twenty-first-century bridge that replaced one of Los Angeles' most recognizable pieces of transportation infrastructure.
Begin at Santa Fe Freight Depot, constructed for the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway after an earlier freight building burned. Harrison Albright designed the replacement as a fireproof reinforced-concrete structure, a construction method sufficiently novel for the building to become an important early Southern California example of the technology. Its extraordinary quarter-mile length accommodated freight operations beside the railroad corridor for decades before industrial decline altered the surrounding district. Southern California Institute of Architecture occupied the building in 2000, converting former freight infrastructure into an architecture campus, and the property entered the National Register of Historic Places in 2006. Continue to Fourth Street Viaduct, completed in 1931 as part of Los Angeles' ambitious program of expansive river crossings. The reinforced-concrete bridge replaced separate automobile and Los Angeles Railway viaducts, removing grade crossings at Mission Road and Santa Fe Avenue and improving movement across a landscape crowded with Union Pacific and Santa Fe tracks. Engineers used temporary reinforced-concrete hinges to construct its 254-foot river span, pairing structural experimentation with precast railings and cast-aluminum lanterns. Its surviving fabric preserves the period when Los Angeles treated bridges as both transportation engineering and civic architecture. Conclude at Sixth Street Viaduct, where Michael Maltzan Architects and HNTB won an international competition to replace the deteriorating 1932 crossing. Alkali-silica reaction had progressively cracked the original concrete, defeating repeated retrofit efforts and leading to demolition beginning in 2016. The $588 million replacement opened in July 2022 as the largest bridge project undertaken by Los Angeles, using ten pairs of illuminated arches to carry the roadway between the Arts District and Boyle Heights. Protected bicycle lanes, broad sidewalks, access stairs and a 790-foot helical ramp expanded the crossing beyond automotive movement. The progression moves from railroad freight infrastructure through an interwar bridge engineered to overcome rail congestion and culminates in a contemporary river crossing that reworked the transportation link between Downtown and Boyle Heights for another century.
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