Cafe Knotted

Cafe Knotted is the Seoul cream-donut phenomenon, and its own framing in Los Angeles is Korean donuts and specialty coffee. It started in Seoul in 2017 as a small artisanal dessert cafe and grew past forty locations in Korea before crossing over. Westfield Century City came first and the Arts District followed, on East 3rd near Little Tokyo. The draw is the hand-crafted cream-filled donuts, and the matcha one belongs in any order you place, alongside the milk cream, the tiramisu and the fresh strawberry milk cream. The matcha drinks hold up next to the pastry case, which is a harder thing for a dessert shop to manage than it sounds. We treat it as a dessert stop with a proper matcha program attached. The interiors are built for photographs and the queue moves, so it works as a mid-afternoon detour.