Today we’d like to introduce you to Janine Awan.
Hi Janine, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I’m the co-owner and art director of Woodcat Coffee and Dinosaur Coffee in Echo Park and Silver Lake respectively. Back in the early 2000s, my husband Saadat was a barista at a well-known cafe in the DC area called Murky Coffee. In between tours as a drummer, his cafe job was really one of the only ones he could leave and come back to repeatedly. While on tour in Europe, he’d be the first bandmate to wake up, go to the local hip cafe, and inevitably make friends with the baristas, and by the time his bandmates rolled out of bed to get coffee, he’d be behind the bar pulling shots for them.
Coffee was something he had a great passion for, so when the two of us met in 2009, it was one of the first things we talked about. When we’d travel to other cities, everything revolved around where to get the best espresso shot, and the local cafe was where you’d find the cool kids and get the buzz on the hippest things to do and see in town. So, considering ourselves cool kids, we joked about maybe having our own one day.
That seemed like it could actually be a real thing when we moved to Echo Park a few years later. If you can believe it, there were very few specialty coffee shops in LA at that time, which is one of the things that pushed us to give our own a go, and we finally opened our first shop, Woodcat Coffee, in 2014–with a lot of heart and little to no money.
Our main goal was not only to make a superb cup of coffee and share it with our neighborhood but to meet people & make friends within the community, having moved to LA knowing only a handful of people. Two friends we made were the founders of another coffee shop up Sunset called Dinosaur Coffee, who were Regulars of ours and vice versa. Fast forward to 2020, and they decided that running Dino wasn’t fitting with the pace of their lives anymore, so they asked us if we’d be interested in buying it from them. We had shared a few employees in the past, so they knew that we worked hard, treated our staff well, and deeply cared about our product and our community. So we decided to give it a go!
Coincidentally, that same year, we also started roasting our own coffee, so it was quite a challenging time for us, especially given the looming global pandemic. Now, almost four years later, we have two successful shops with great staff and a supportive community, a fantastic array of coffees that we roast ourselves, and lots of friends in our community.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
It’s been a smooth but hilly road.
Every year, operating a small business is becoming more and more expensive in this city. We have to learn tax laws and employment laws and health & safety laws and insurance laws; we small biz owners have to become experts in everything! Equipment breaks on the regular but being able to quickly do repairs ourselves is something Saadat takes a lot of pride in. Being such hands-on owners has been a struggle. As we’ve grown, learning to let go has been tough and understanding that, as owners, we see things at a microscopic level while the staff may not. Working so closely with your life partner is a struggle in and of itself, mainly adapting to each other’s opposing communication styles. I could go on infinitely!
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
We roast & brew coffee and provide space for our community to gather over our mutual love of coffee. Woodcat was one of the first specialty coffee shops on Sunset Blvd in Echo Park. Dinosaur was opened the following year by its founders, and we took over the reins in 2020.
Saadat is a child of immigrants from Pakistan; he’s the firstborn in the US.
We are a married couple, and our cafes are literal mom-and-pop shops and we just want to make the best cup of coffee that we can for our community. We think a lot about providing a great customer experience.
Were Echo Park locals since 2012. We opened Woodcat in 2014 and began roasting/took over Dinosaur in 2020. Woodcat and Dinosaur are aesthetically very different so one would never associate them together just based on that. But our drink menus are the same.
I illustrate and design all of our packaging and merch: stickers, coffee bags, tote bags, hoodies, etc.
Dinosaur is known for a beautiful interior space with lots of light, places to sit & chat or work, and really good specialty drinks like our Cardi-C (cardamom-cinnamon cappuccino) Sweet Baby Jo (our take on a Spanish latte named after the founder’s 1st born daughter) or our tamarind shrub (a vinegar-based non-alcoholic concoction). We also really focus on dialing in our drip coffee so it’s well-balanced.
We have pastries from Sugarbloom delivered daily and Scones from Sugarbird, as well as donuts from Nuts & Bolts on weekends. This year, we are soft-launching breakfast tacos from Super Rad on Saturday mornings.
We also have really phenomenal Decaf espresso! Decaf sometimes feels like such an afterthought in the specialty coffee world, but we believe that decaf drinkers are coffee lovers too. So we put a lot of effort into selecting and roasting a really good decaf.
Contact Info:
- Website: woodcatcoffee.com / dinosaurcoffee.com
- Instagram: dinosaur_coffee / woodcatcoffee
Image Credits
Connie Chen Photography
