majisuka rock and roll :: Café Maji

We could have never gotten here without a car. It's one of those places that you can only get to when you drive to LA, rather than take buses or planes. When you go by public transit, travelling one hour to get to more food places seems like overkill. With a car, it's a part of exploring.

Café Maji is one of the more popular cafés that aren't within LA. Rather, it's situated in a city northeast of LA, called Arcadia. Apparently, Arcadia is where many many rich Asian people live, and they have huge houses and send their kids to private schools, and their kids are expected to go to ivies, jokes my friend (we are also Asian, so don't kill me).
 

The café is especially unique in that it's situated in the corner of a gym! No, don't envision some sweaty, dank gym with cheap memberships. More like a gymnasium from an anime? The bright kind where light comes in, the floors are freshly waxed, and the ceiling is really high up. People seem to do yogalates in this gym. 

You've got to sign in at the gym's front desk, and they've got a sign up sheet especially for the café. Then you go up to the second floor, and there it is, decorated cutely.

Another thing I really loved about it was the bookshelves stacked with awesome reading material. Some cafés have good reading material, but this one had BY FAR, the BEST assortment of it. There were children's picture books, funny books that radiated truth, obscure dreamy magazines full of photo-shoots of pretty models and interviews from oh so independent women saying oh so relatable things, manga in different languages, a good bunch of easily-readable novels... I thought, this is exactly what would keep me coming back here, if I didn't live 300+ miles away.

We sat down next to a bookshelf and shared a bulgogi quesadilla, and I got two drinks because I couldn't pick between them all. I wanted a latte, but some of the other drinks were so nicely presented, as I saw online. I ended up getting a green tea latte and a passionfruit tea lemonade. The latte art was even more adorable in person than it was in pictures, holy crap, it's somehow so fluffy looking. Passionfruit tea lemonade was gorgeous and picturesque but meh tasting, the ice melted too quickly since I forgot to ask for less ice.

A really nice touch added to the drinks is they all come with a cream puff! I think the cream puff is just there for aesthetics, but it's such a nice touch. Small things like this are why I continue to love cafés. They're all special in their own way.

The bulgogi quesadilla, interestingly, fuses the Mexican quesadilla and Korean marinated BBQ beef, called bulgogi. We wondered why such a thing existed after seeing parallels all over the place (bulgogi tacos are also common around Ktown), then researched it, because Hannah is big into researching the world. We found out that Koreatown has a Hispanic majority living within the area that has coexisted with the Korean community for decades, which inspires a cultural intermix that reflects in the food and relations between both groups. I'd always wondered why it seems like the combo of Korean and Mexican food is so popular within foodie circles. It's not just in LA either, trends tend to migrate from LA to the Bay. One of the first and most popular food trucks in the San Jose area was MoGo BBQ, which specializes in Korean-themed burritos. (The quesadilla was great, by the way!)

Recommend Café Maji for those who love reading.

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Café Maji

56 E Duarte Rd, Arcadia, CA

(626) 802-8743
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