La La Land Kind Cafe to open in former Starbucks space
By Toi Creel
A Texas-based cafe that makes an effort to hire foster youth is planning on opening a storefront on the Westside.
La La Land Kind Café, a Dallas-based pastry and food spot will take the place of the former Starbucks located at 1426 Montana Avenue Suite 4 in Santa Monica. Currently, there’s no signage up, but food blog Toddrickallen confirmed that the cafe will be opening in the near future. A firm opening date has yet to be announced.
The cafe, with three locations in Dallas, offers standard coffee and tea drinks alongside more creative options. These include signature matcha lattes, including a drink made with blue butterfly pea flower, and also unique coffee creations including an “upside down latte”.
From the food end, La La Land offers a range of toasts, chia seed puddings and overnight oats. Among these options include an avocado toast with cream cheese, chili flakes and lemon.
In addition to the food and drink offerings, La La Land also touts itself as a socially conscious cafe with the purposes of hiring foster youth.
“After learning about the staggering statistics of what happens to foster youth who age out of the system, we were left in shock. Kids who have spent their lives alone, were then left on the street at the age of 18. This led us into creating the We Are One project in 2017. We were set out to provide everything youth needed to become self sustaining, happy adults. This meant providing help with housing, job placement, mentorship, and therapy. As much as we tried, it wasn’t working. Our youth could not get or maintain jobs, and without a job everything else would crumble. Employers were not willing to hire youth with no experience, or did not have the patience to teach them. If no one was going to hire our youth, we set out to do it our selves,” reads the website.
