squishy waffles + squishy log pillows :: Café Korobokgur

Hello world, my name's JoAnn with a capital A. This blog will be used to highlight my café discoveries wherever I travel, since I needed a place to ramble about café details and save my thoughts without having to use Yelp. This blog will also be informative about things that come up while rambling, because we like knowledge.

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My first entry on this blog I've been wanting to create forever will be from when I went to LA this summer with my friend Jessice, and we visited a Korean café called Café Korobokgur. I liked this café the most out of any café I've ever been to, so this is the first entry. I think that their name unpronounceableness adds to the authenticity.

I really love Korean cafés and Japanese cafés, because they tend to have all kinds of lovable whimsical themes that I like, or they're just full of cute stuff without any theme at all. If I had to describe this one, it'd be woodsy married to modern. They had tiny woodsy details intermixed with minimalist decor, like flat and non-flat log pillows, tree-ish hints everywhere, a small elf man logo, and things all over the place from Studio Ghibli movies. Doesn't Totoro remind you of forests? Maybe because forests = calm = Studio Ghibli. Even when terrible things are happening in Ghibli films, there's a sense of calm.

 

I took very many pictures of the interior, that I have yet to upload from my phone, so Instagram collages will have to do for now. The space wasn't so small that it was cramped and not so huge that it was impersonal. This perfection in space size maybe had to do with how much furniture there was in the room. The furniture was spaced out so that you could walk easily between the sitting area (full of tables accommodating different sizes of groups), the bathrooms, the ordering/pickup and coffee-making area, and everything is very perfectly mismatched.

The space was adorned with small details that really added to the atmosphere. There were No Face and Totoro plushies, and various mini Ghibli details in places that you would definitely miss if you didn't look closely. Despite the calmness, you can still feel the chic vibes when you stand next to the British telephone booth and stare at the circular paper lights. They also have men's and women's bathrooms that are marked by girl and boy versions of their elf logo.

From the menu, we ordered the waffle and shared it together, and it was super squishy and pillowy, like a waffle made of clouds and gluten! I wanted to hog it all to myself, but I didn't, which makes me a very good friend. The presentation was amazing, how perfectly aligned the waffles are to the complimentary scoop of vanilla ice cream, waffle condiments, and the useless but decorative sprinkling of powdered chocolate. My friend Nielle told me that the tteokbokki here was really good, but we were way too stuffed from the food whirlwind that came before to have anything other than desserts..

I also tried their vanilla latté, which tasted great in all its artsy presentation, as expected from a hipster-approved coffee source. When I asked for extra sugar, the waiter brought two packets of organic Hawaiian brown sugar out to me on a small square wooden platter, set perfectly aligned on a slightly smaller square brown napkin matching the small square platter, and a special tiny long spoon to stir the extra sugar in with. My brain poked me and went "privilege", but overall this gesture was very nice and caring of the staff. Such good service. ♡

Café Korobokgur uses the IntelligentsiA brand of coffee, which is one of the more popular artisanal coffee brands here in California. It's fair trade, appealing to the hipsters. I won't go on and on about coffee, because I'm a café addict who can't tell coffees apart, and I have no preference. If you want, you can find more about IntelligentsiA coffee from their website, but here's an interesting bit. As Wikipedia notes, the intelligentsia is actually "a social class of people engaged in complex mental labour aimed at guiding or critiquing, or otherwise playing a leadership role in shaping a society's culture and politics. This therefore might include everyone from artists to school teachers, as well as academics, writers, journalists and other hommes de lettres (men of letters)." In a way, it seems they chose the name describing the hipsters and smarty people of the olden days to make a sort of parallel with their current target market.

This place is my absolute favorite café in the world at the moment, and although I've gone to lots of cafés, there's also a lot of cafés I haven't been to. This could change any day. Also, whenever I go to a new great place, I tend to feel like it's the best ever, so I don't think the weight of my favorite is very heavy.

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Café Korobokgur
464 W 8th St, Los Angeles, CA 90005

(213) 388-8818