Alfred Coffee—the massive L.A. coffee chain with over 20 locations across the county—will be opening up its first Long Beach location. Taking over the former Local Spot space at the southwest corner of Pacific Coast Highway and Loynes Drive, it marks another notch in what is becoming a rather stellar belt of coffee spots across the city.
And this forthcoming Long Beach location matters strategically for the brand and its approach to where it opens shops. It places Alfred not in a dense pedestrian downtown, but in an eastside corridor where coastal commuter culture, student traffic, and residential routine overlap.
In other words, exactly the kind of daily-use ecosystem that Alfred has historically preferred.
What is Alfred and what can people expect from its Long Beach location?
Founded in 2013 by Josh Akhtarzad on Melrose Place—and since expanded into separate matcha cafes and tea rooms—Alfred began less as a conventional coffee chain and more as a curated, very L.A. answer to a very L.A. question: what would happen if a coffee shop treated branding, design, and neighborhood vibes with the same seriousness as the drinks?
What makes Alfred notable in Los Angeles is that the location was an essential part of the brand itself. And that it’s phenomenal growth—nearing 25 locations across Los Angeles County, as well as an Austin, Texas location—never fully abandoned the neighborhood thesis that built it. That is, to feel site-specific rather than franchised.
Josh’s early instinct was that Los Angeles did not just need another espresso bar; it needed a cafe that felt native to the city’s pace, aesthetics, and sociality. It was, through and through, a Millennial-centric approach to the coffee shop: polished but relaxed. Photogenic without feeling corporate. And rooted enough that people would treat it like part of their daily geography—something that, nearly fifteen years ago, was rare.
From Melrose Place to beyond: The growth of Alfred made it destined for Long Beach.
Alfred’s visual linguistics—white tile, restrained branding, curated interiors, stamped sleeves, its famed “But first, coffee” sign at Melrose Place—made it one of the first Los Angeles coffee operators to fully understand Instagram not as a marketing add-on, but as a spatial strategy.
Yet behind the aesthetic, Alfred also aligned itself with serious coffee standards. It used Stumptown Coffee Roasters beans (opening its Melrose shop the very same year Stumptown opened its fame DTLA space by Bestia).
Its expansion across the county avoided clusters in commercial areas and instead opted for Angeleno spaces that already carried strong local identities: Silver Lake. Brentwood. Studio City. Beverly Hills. Pasadena… It allowed each location to read as if it belonged to its block rather than replicating a template.
For Long Beach, Alfred arrives in a city with an already mature independent coffee culture. We have everything from long-standing operators like Rose Park Roasters, Recreational, Black Ring, Common Room Roasters… We’ve even had the unfortunate reality of lamenting a loss of one of our pioneers, Lord Windsor’s Wade Windsor.
This isn’t Alfred attempting to change Long Beach coffee culture—it missed the timeframe to do that long ago—but it is about a major outside brand testing whether its Los Angeles identity can translate into a city that values its neighborhoods and authenticity. That hyped tension may be exactly why this opening will be closely watched.
Alfred’s first Long Beach location will be located at 6200 Pacific Coast Hwy. in Suite B.
