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At Cafe 2001, breakfast rolls out for the Arts District morning crowd at 8 a.m. An unusually beautiful avocado toast, crowned with a soft-boiled egg, can arrive alongside your cappuccino or hojicha. The wobbling oval hides, just visible, in a grassy nest of julienned zucchini, cucumber and kohlrabi. This is the day’s healthy start, rendered as Easter egg hunt.
After 11 a.m., lunch-leaning dishes become available. The lineup rotates, but you can safely depend on a pork tenderloin katsu sandwich that checks all the boxes: squishy, precisely rectangular slices of shokupan; juicy hunks of meat outlined in the sheerest breading; and a sharp-sweet lacquer made of ketchup, hot mustard and a Japanese brand of barbecue sauce.
The katsu sandwich with pork cutlet and milk bread. Cafe 2001 is located adjacent to Yess restaurant, with its own back entrance, in downtown L.A.’s Arts District. (Emil Ravelo / For The Times)
The last menu item is ready at 1 p.m. and not a moment before: watermelon cake. If the algorithms did their job, a slice was the viral hit you saw on the socials this summer — the pretty image that drew you to Cafe 2001, a peculiar and quietly serious little place, with a narrow yet soaring space reclaimed from urban decay, and casual, sophisticated daytime meals. Its eccentricities feel like welcome refuge.
For the star-turn dessert, Cafe 2001 chef Giles Clark readily credits Toshio Tanabe and his French restaurant in Tokyo, Ne Quittez Pas, as inspiration. If in Clark’s pastry case you glimpse a whole cake already missing a section, you could momentarily mistake it for extra-bright red velvet. That tells you about the proportions: think a round of the fresh fruit sandwiched between slim layers of simple sponge cake and covered in smooth whipped cream frosting. Its deliciousness relies on the ratios of the three contrasting textures, offset by a splotch of watermelon boiled down to jam.
The watermelon cake, inspired by chef Toshio Tanabe of Tokyo’s Ne Quittez Pas.
(Emil Ravelo / For The Times)
Clark grew up in England, and the slyest touch to the cake is a finishing garnish of clear Fox’s Glacier Mints, a 107-year-old English candy, grated over top before serving. The dusting settles invisibly. A menthol coolness drifts by every other bite, more passing thought than flavoring.
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Reviewers choose restaurants that reflect a range of cuisines, neighborhoods and price tiers, making multiple visits. Critics do not announce themselves, nor do they accept comped dishes or discounts. The Times pays for every meal.
This slice of joy will disappear soon with the changing seasons. At the end of a recent solo lunch I asked for a wedge to go, and the staffer politely declined, telling me the chef wouldn’t allow it. The cake’s construction, he implied, was far too delicate. The refusal didn’t surprise or rile me. The players in question are known to be earnest perfectionists.
Cafe 2001 resides in the back of the same stronghold of a building, originally a bank that debuted in 1924, that houses Yess, the polarizing and mercurial Japanese restaurant where Junya Yamasaki leads the kitchen. Clark worked with Yamasaki in London. They both signed on with owner Kino Kaetsu to create Yess, which opened with Clark as sous chef in 2023 after several years of pandemic-related delays.
The team always envisioned operating two restaurants in the massive space. Kaetsu incorporated a second tiny kitchen in a back-corner alcove during the buildout of Yess, which is enormous by comparison. She and the chefs brainstormed the unused area early on: Could it be a small, smart bistro? Or a nook to serve tasting menus, polished and gastronomic?
A metal staircase leads to the second level, where the narrow floor wraps atrium-style around walls of exposed brick.
(Emil Ravelo / For The Times)
What eventually came together was far more bootstrap. Adjacent to the ordering counter, Clark filled the cafe with mismatched tables and chairs, some borrowed from friends. Climb a metal staircase to the second level, where the narrow floor wraps atrium-style around walls of exposed brick. If I could peek at the screens of customers camped out up there with their laptops, I imagine half would be polishing TV scripts and the others tweaking AI models.
The vibe is coffee shop meets concrete bunker, and pockets of odd, industrial beauty reveal themselves. Last week I thought to look all the way up to the ceiling, where skylights with spidery cracks seep milky light. Their mix of rusty streaks, splotchy painted lines and blue ovoid shadows could pass, out of context, for early abstract expressionism. Near the ground floor stereo, tuned midday to Classical KUSC, is an actual piece of art: A glassed-in sculpture by Sam Shoemaker that resembles stacked rounds of aging cheese but is made from mycelium — the root structure of fungus, a material emerging as a biodegradable building structure, from which Shoemaker also recently fashioned a kayak to paddle from Catalina Island to San Pedro.
The setting and the cooking cohere. Clark works out his own permissive definition of cafe food. He makes a breakfast sandwich of bacon and Benedictine spread, a combination of cucumber and cream cheese credited to an early 1900s caterer in Kentucky that also comes across as very British. With a balanced hand, he pairs sweet and savory on more substantial plates in the morning: huckleberry jam dolloped alongside kerchiefs of smoked trout with hash browns, a pile of cubed lamb hash with a small pool of applesauce hidden among the meat and potatoes.
Cafe 2001 chef Giles Clark worked with Jun Yamasaki at Yess as well as at restaurants such as Chez Panisse in Berkeley, St. John Bread and Wine in London and Den in Tokyo. (Emil Ravelo / For The Times)
For lunch, beyond the katsu sandwich, there’s usually a slice of pork and pistachio terrine, textured and peppery and complete with cornichons, a couple slivers of toast and a tuft of salad. A fun workshop spirit also animates this part of the menu. Clark brings an edge to more composed salads. He slipped slender half-moons of pickled bitter melon into a summer salad of corn and peppers. Dill blankets hunks of chewy, lemony celeriac like seaweed over a coral reef.
Zero in on the one ever-changing entree. It’s been saffron-scented rockfish, tripe in ragout and more recently a classic Tuscan tagliata, the near-rare slices of beef veiled in arugula and Parmesan, served with a fantastic side of reedy, ultra-crisp fries studded with fried sage leaves. Clark has passed through several pedigreed restaurants in his career — Chez Panisse, St. John Bread and Wine in London and Den in Tokyo among them — and these ephemeral dishes hint at the whimsy and technique he has in his reserves.
Lunchtime: a slice of pork and pistachio terrine, textured and peppery, comes with cornichons, a couple slivers of toast and a tuft of salad.
(Emil Ravelo / For The Times)
So do impeccable yeasted brioche doughnuts, the filled kind inspired by St. John, that show up as late morning snacks. He pipes them either with vanilla custard or with strawberry jam, and the move is to order both and eat them nearly at once until their contents spurt and merge into a sweet swirl. Clark mentioned that unlike at St. John, he dusts them with powdered sugar “as I find it more voluptuous,” he said, “and it’s how the old-style supermarket doughnuts in the U.K. do.” It could seem like a minor thing, but the detail he invests in taste memory hits home.
In the pastry department, Clark has a partner in Kota Kawamura, who moved from Japan to open Yess. The two chefs would make lemon tarts together on their days off, which ended up being the cafe’s first tested recipe. Kawamura now makes several exacting tarts daily, their shells yielding and shattering. I especially love the ones tiled with spiraling seasonal fruits, laid over an inch of dense custard.
Katsu, bacon sandwiches, lamb hash, weirdly wonderful salads, watermelon cake, doughnuts, tarts: The hodgepodge clicks, and the creativity feels unloosed. In its own scrappy, eccentric, affordable way, Cafe 2001 brings back memories of last decade’s era of experimental risk-takers (names like Guerrilla Tacos, Baroo, Lasa, Sqirl, Rice Bar and the first iteration of Kato come to mind), when the economics of restaurants in Los Angeles didn’t feel quite so dire. Use it as a coffee stop, settle in for some surprisingly considered cooking, pay attention to see what might, like dinner service, come next: The approach of Clark and his team embodies potential.
Cafe 2001
2001 E. 7th St. (north entrance), Los Angeles, (213) 335-9951, instagram.com/cafe2001.la
Prices: Avocado toast and breakfast sandwich $12, other breakfast dishes $7.50 to $16.50. Most lunch dishes $8.50 to $16. Tarts and other pastries $8 to $10.
Details: Breakfast and lunch Tuesday to Sunday 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Beer and wine available, as is a ranging selection of coffee, tea and made-in-house sodas in flavors like green grape and tarragon. Street and nearby lot parking.
Recommended dishes: avocado toast with optional egg, Benedictine bacon sandwich, pork katsu sandwich, daily meat or seafood entree, filled brioche doughnuts, fruit tarts, watermelon cake (in season).
(Emil Ravelo / For The Times)