[dropcap size=big]E[/dropcap]y foo you a rocker? Do you like coffee? If you answered yes to both, you have to stop by the new coffee pop-up in East L.A., Mystyx Kafe.
If you live in or frequent Boyle Heights and East Los Angeles, you know the streets are packed with the nation’s best street food. You can find anything between tamales, pupusas, empanadas, esquites, and the city’s best churros on any given corner on Cesar Chavez or Whittier Boulevards.
But on the corner of Rowan Avenue and Cesar Chavez, Julian “Filth” first popped up to sell coffee with a goth aesthetic, from a wooden lemonade stand decorated with hanging bats, lights, and figurines of Attitude Era WWE wrestling stars like Kane and the Undertaker. After a couple of weeks, he moved some blocks down to Cesar Chavez Avenue, between Gage and Record Streets, in front of a motorcycle shop institution in the area, Mototecnica, which is where he hopes to stay for now.
Though there are a few coffee shops in the surrounding area, Julian works to set himself apart by providing a different vibe to customers. “When I walk around different cities, I feel like all coffee shops are the same,” he says as he brews some coffee under the East Los sun. “They give the same ‘vanilla’ vibe. I wanted to start something different, connected to goth subculture.”