Next stop on our survey of beautiful cafes with legit coffee is Singing Sun Coffee in the seaside town of Ventura, California.
This cafe has that casual coastal vibe with a sense of understated but calibrated taste. Women come in for their morning coffee in yoga pants, rolled mats tucked under their arms. Guys come in wearing board shorts and slides. There are a lot of people with extensive, visible tattoos waiting in line for their espressos. On the weekends, surfer couples with very small children in tow come in for their cappuccinos and a light after-surf nosh.
Singing Sun Coffee is bright and airy. It sits on an attractive corner of a small intersection where large windows allow tons of sunlight into a space decorated with leafy green plants and floral artwork. Coffee is served in beautiful ceramic cups on proper saucers. Their espresso menu is on point.
The cafe is fulfilling a demand for high-quality coffee and offering a beautifully hip but laidback third place in a neighborhood that’s away from the relative bustle of downtown Ventura a few miles away. Singing Sun is in a fairly bland neighborhood that feels a bit sleepy and a touch shabby, a boring part of town that is mostly a middle-class residential area east of the city’s lively and picturesque downtown. But that is changing and the cafe is part of that change.
Ventura is the urban center of a vast ranching and farming region, but in recent years this unsung, yet attractive Southern California town has been “rediscovered” and has started to attract a lot of people — young couples, families, retirees — who are escaping Los Angeles’s ridiculously expensive housing costs but who are now also priced out of the popular historic downtown and beachfront districts of the town. Singing Sun’s neighborhood is not so much gentrifying as absorbing Ventura’s growth as the area re-blossoms and caters to the tastes of its newer residents.
GLOBAL GRAPHICA 