Miss Cheese Tea Cafe

Miss Cheese Tea Cafe has been pouring cheese foam tea in Los Angeles since 2019, and it now runs three cafes: Pasadena, Little Tokyo and the Financial District downtown. The name comes from that foam, the Taiwanese sea salt cream that caps a tea, and the motto printed on everything is Say Cheese Everyday. Simon Yip took the business over in the fall of 2022, and how he got there is the part we love. He taught himself coding and graphic design at sixteen, built a website with a hundred thousand members while still in high school, and ran a design and programming company from 2009. It shows in the shops: Miss Cheese wrote its own order-management algorithm, and in-store monitors put a live wait estimate in front of you while you stand there. Matcha runs as its own series across all three addresses, with a Matcha Milk Tea, a Strawberry and a Mango Matcha built on smashed fruit, a Taro Matcha Milk Tea and a Matcha Taro Cloud finished with taro foam. The tea comes from Taiwan. The food is Japanese, taiyaki and the souffle pancakes that people travel for, and every cafe keeps board games, arcade cabinets and a mini pool table going for the wait.