Most coffee shops just serve drinks. Boulon D Amour serves an experience.
The rose-colored cafe is a destination for Angelenos to drink caffeine cocktails out of champagne coupes topped with edible flowers and pose for photos with pink lattes.
Everything at the cafe is pink, from the Marzocco espresso machine to the grout between the tiles on the wall. A fuchsia neon sign in the shape of a lightning bolt hangs at the entrance, symbolizing Boulon D Amour’s translation, “bolt of love.”
However, this chic cafe is not in a trendy area like Silverlake or West Hollywood. It sits across the street from a cemetery on West Washington Boulevard in the West Adams neighborhood. When Chantel Khorsandi opened Boulon D Amour less than a year ago, she prioritized creating a unique coffee experience to make the cafe a destination for caffeine lovers and social media mavens alike.
“Coffee always kind of spoke to me because caffeine and sitting and having tea and coffee is part of every culture,” says Khorsandi, “It’s not only a coffee shop, it’s an experience.”
The experience in question can best be described as a childhood tea party all grown up. Guests, young and old, sit around the hot pink tables, sipping their drinks out of floral china and glistening glasses.
“It’s very rare to drink coffee out of a champagne coupe,” says 28-year-old Khorsandi, “as a kid, you’re not allowed to touch the crystal, and now you’re sitting at a cafe, and you’re getting that experience.”
From the elaborate drinks to the Volkswagen Beetle with a vanity plate that reads “BOULON” parked outside, everything at the cafe begs to be photographed. A quick scroll through the Boulon D Amour Instagram tag reveals hundreds of posts of people smiling with their drinks in one of the many photogenic corners of the shop. The cafe’s Instagram alone has nearly 15,000 followers.
“Chantel has done a really good job marketing social media,” said Samantha Arias, an original Boulon employee and barista. “We’ve grown tremendously, and we are doing really well, and it’s steady.”
Los Angeles has no shortage of cafes, but Boulon has found its niche as a haven for customers who want to drink their coffee in style.
“The aesthetic is very hyper-feminine and girly, all the stuff that I love,” said customer Carolyn Esposito as she posed for a picture with the blush-colored Volkswagen.
Esposito found the cafe on the Instagram account Hidden Los Angeles, one of the many social media avenues that have featured Boulon.
“The food is very, very pretty, very Instagrammable,” said Esposito. She ordered two of the cafe’s most Instagram-friendly items, the pink chai latte known as “The Mean Girl” and a rainbow bagel.
Another popular menu item is a bagel stuffed with Hot Cheetos and cream cheese, which may seem like simply bait for photos, but Khorsandi had a sentimental reason to add it to the menu.
“We would go to like the little carts and get them like a butter bagel with cream cheese and a side of hot Cheetos, and we’d kind of eat it all together,” said Khorsandi. “It was like a nostalgic thing from middle school.”
The cafe’s ambiance is not only optimal for photo ops, but it also encourages customers to sit down and stay awhile.
“The coffee world is usually just like grab and go,” said Barista Samantha Arias, “here, It’s more like sit down, take photos, really enjoy yourself, really have good conversations.”
Underneath all of the pink, glitz and glamour, Khorsandi wanted to make a place where she would want to go and have excellent food.
“Everything started as a really, truly simple coffee shop,” said the owner, “and then I decided to put a flower onto a latte, and that flower kind of blossomed into Boulon.”