Play Coffee Offers Serious Espresso at Laguna Beach Flagship

Howard Bryman | January 7, 2026

At the Play Coffee flagship location in Laguna Beach. All images courtesy of Play Coffee.

Where Laguna Canyon meets the coast in Laguna Beach, California, a playground for explorers of specialty coffee has arrived with the opening of Play Coffee‘s flagship location.

A wide, rotating range of single-origin coffees awaits visitors to the new shop, which showcases more than a dozen roasters from around the world at any given time. Baristas pull espresso on a La Marzocco Leva X paired with a Weber Workshops EG-1 grinder, with an emphasis on clarity and nuance.

“In Laguna, we wanted to bring a heightened level of focus on espresso,” Play Coffee Founder Leon Wansikehian told Daily Coffee News. “You will find four to six coffees on our espresso menu, each served with unique recipes and pressure profiles to highlight the bright acidity we enjoy.”

More traditional espresso-based drinks come through a La Marzocco KB90, which also serves as a piece of playground equipment for more experimental espresso-based concoctions.

Wansikehian and Play Coffee Director of Quality Control Ashley Papa handle purchasing and help dial in espresso, as well as manual pourovers with April brewers and a Mahlkönig EK43 with fitted SSP burrs. The same grinder preps beans for cold brew steeped overnight in Toddy brewers and batch brew made on Curtis machines equipped with the Litmus Spray Head designed by Scott Rao.

Water for all methods is re-mineralized to a proprietary recipe after flowing through a 10-stage filtration system designed with help from Orange-based Flow Motion Water Systems.

“It feels like we are one of the last few multiroasters that hasn’t stepped into roasting or a hybrid model of roasting and showcasing other projects,” Wansikehian said. “We plan to continue showcasing the great work of our many partners like Nomad, Tim Wendelboe, Apollon’s Gold, Prolog, Sey, La Cabra, Poma, April, Luna, Tanat, Datura, and Mame to name a few.”

Play Coffee’s first shop opened in Fullerton in 2020 as a walk-up bar built into repurposed shipping containers, with outdoor seating near a train station. The second shop, which opened in Orange, operates in a historic former bank building.

The new 1,400-square-foot flagship that opened last month is the first cafe over which Play has had full control of layout and design. With guidance from Laguna Beach-based architect Anders Lasater, the company worked with artisans and fabricators on a modern mix of raw steel, smooth concrete, and brick-and-mortar finishes behind the bar, plus covered patio seating out front and warm wood banquettes and chairs inside.

“Laguna Beach is really our first true brick and mortar. It was important for us to think about how we wanted the space to feel. It is a bit of an evolution of the brand, a bit of a maturation,” Wansikehian said. “The brutal stainless steel accents gleam on bar, pitching properly where coffee belongs: at the center of it all.”

Play also offers fresh daily pastries from local bakery Colossus and donuts from Long Beach-based Caffeinated Kitchen. The bar also does not shy away from layered flavor builds, such as the Volcano Latte, topping a demerara brown sugar-sweetened espresso with woodfire-smoked sea salt.

As a Christmas Day offering, the new location featured a Saffron Cappuccino with milk infused with saffron threads imported from Iran, then combined with black cardamom from Guatemala, vanilla beans from Madagascar, Vietnamese cinnamon and local wildflower honey. The drink was steamed and poured with Las Brisas espresso by Barcelona-based roaster Nomad Coffee.

“Our goal is to continue to improve from within,” said Wansikehian. “We feel happy and accomplished here. Fullerton, Orange and Laguna Beach are communities we care deeply about, and we would like to continue to strengthen our friendships with our guests here.”