A Novice’s Guide to Coffee

The Cafe Nido Story

The Hi(story) of Coffee, and Cafe Nido

Chapter 1 - The Hi(story) of Coffee

Like most interesting things, the history of a coffee is a murky one, and the story changes depending on who you ask. Since you’re asking me, I’ll tell you the most interesting origin story for coffee that I could find.

There once lived a man named Kaldi in the Ethiopia region of Kaffa, which is located in southwestern Ethiopia. Kaldi was a goat herder, and he kept a close watch on his goats — as most good goat herders do. One day, Kaldi noticed that his goats became unusually energetic after eating berries from a specific plant. As the legend goes, they even started dancing.

Kaldi inspected the plant and decided to try the berries for himself. To his surprise, Kaldi became so energized that he couldn’t sleep that night. Kaldi continued to eat the berries when he felt drowsy, and one day he shared his story about his magical berries with an abbott at a local monastary.

The about was intrigued. He had been struggling to stay awake at night during long hours of evening prayer and was willing to give the magic berries a shot. The abbott crushed the berries into a cup and added hot water — which was, in my estimation, the first cup of coffee ever made.

Chapter 2 - The Story of Cafe Nido

About 1,173 years later, on June 24, 2023, Cafe Nido opened its doors in Silver Lake — a beautiful, east side neighborhood located in Los Angeles, California.

Much like the abbott at the monastery, I didn’t know what the hell I was doing initially. I might as well have crushed up fresh coffee cherries into hot water — that's how little coffee experience I had. I had never worked in a coffee shop or been a barista. In fact, I applied to a handful of coffee shops and couldn’t even get hired as a barista in the months leading up to the opening of the shop. (Which, looking back on, I totally understand).

Although my brother and co-founder of Cafe Nido might disagree, I wasn’t totally useless initially. I did have experience in customer service (I’d worked nearly every job you could have in a restaurant from doorman to manager), sales, and advertising.

Before Cafe Nido opened, I was a copywriter. Copywriters, despite popular public sentiment, don’t work in copywriting law. Instead, copywriters write “copy,” or the old-school term for words. I was an ad writer. I wrote taglines, catch phrases, headlines, billboards, radio scripts, website copy, and more.

Unfortunately, the job wasn’t quite as exhilarating as I thought it was going to be. I thought I was going to be working on creative, forward-looking accounts and writing catchy, punchy copy that really got through to people. I thought there would be scotch in the office, and less like Mad Men, and a lot more like a data entry job. At some point I checked out, and when Chat GPT came around, I realized that my time as a copywriter was pretty much over.