Community Highlights: Meet Joana Rubio and Seleste Diaz of Little Barn Coffee House

Today we’d like to introduce you to Joana Rubio and Seleste Diaz.

Hi Joana and Seleste, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
Seleste and I are life partners band mates and business partners, we share a passion for veganism. While touring with our band two things inspired us to start our own vegan cafe. One the amazing vegan food that was available through the states and two the lack of vegan food in most states we toured. We both worked at Chango a coffee shop in echo park for many years having the experience working and managing a coffee shop and the passion drove us even more to manifesting owning our own vegan cafe, one in which we can create a safe space and empower our Latinx roots and share our pride to be in the lgbtq community. During prime pandemic, we were both unemployed and an opportunity presented itself for us to take over a cafe and start our new venture Little Barn Coffee House. As two full of love born and raised Los Angeles minorities, our mission is to provide to all communities in which no one will be discriminated upon, let us feed you and spread a message of compassion through vegan cuisine.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
It wasn’t easy opening Little Barn in the middle of a pandemic we were both learning alongside the rest of the world how to stay safe and take proper precautions to keep our loved ones safe. We rarely left home just the essentials so it was a trying times. We hired a contractor who ended up getting sick and left the job half done. We were distraught with no one to turn to so we took matters into our own hands and with the help of our family and friends, we were able to make our dream happen, started breaking down walls, putting up drywall, painting, plumbing you name it. “si se puede” we worked hard to build our little tiny shop with our bare hands.

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
Little Barn Coffee House a 100% vegan cafe. We specialize in vegan comfort foods breakfast to lunch. We make most of our ingredients fresh in house. Specializing in Vegan buttermilk biscuits sandwiches our Maple Fennel Sausage biscuit being our most popular item in our menu. We make and bake all our bread in house from our vegan croissants, biscuits to our pan dulce like conchas, Mexican wedding cookies, polvorones. We fuse our Latin flavors with our favorite American comfort foods. Pairing it with specialty coffees like our oat horchata cold brews, vegan vanilla lattes, vegan pumpkin spice lattes, Mexican hot chocolate we veganized it all. We make tamales added spice to our sandwiches. We put lots of love and dedication to our craft for it to transcend into our food. We are proud to be LGBTQ Latinx women of color cafe. We want everyone to feel welcomed and come share the love with us.

Risk taking is a topic that people have widely differing views on – we’d love to hear your thoughts.
I can say we are both risk takers opening in a pandemic is one of the biggest risk we’ve ever taken. Not knowing what would happen next if our hard work and business was going to be successful or if it was going to be shut down or what if one of us got sick so many fears yet trying to stay positive in such unprecedented times. It was hard but you can’t live in fear you have to take the risk do your best hope for the best be strong work hard and do it with love. This is just a reminder to people out there that anything is possible don’t be scared to move forward and take action.

Contact Info:

• Email: [email protected]
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/littlebarncoffeehouse
• Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/littlebarncoffeehouse/
• Yelp: https://yelp.to/0r9XSkzYCpb
• SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/starsatnight/tracks

Image Credits:
Alejandra Robles Luna & Little Barn Coffee House