This roaster’s passion is fueled by coffee and community

During my interview with Gacia Tachejian to get the lowdown on Laidrey Coffee Roasters, she asks politely to step away for a moment to greet a passing customer.

“Congratulations!” says Tachejian—Laidrey’s co-founder, managing partner and head coffee roaster—before returning to our call. “Sorry, that was a customer who’s been coming to us for a very long time. Our coffee cart was at her wedding, and now she’s coming in with a dog and she’s pregnant. So I can just see the whole life span of a family. It’s pretty cool.”

This is the level of community Tachejian has cultivated within the four walls of Laidrey Coffee Roasters’ three San Fernando Valley cafés. It’s the reason she wakes up each morning with a smile, ready to go to work, she says.

Even when she visited coffee shops as a teenager, Tachejian didn’t stay for the coffee. “It was really a place to study, a place to meet with friends and have a community around you.” That same sense of belonging led her to spend $800 a month at her favorite cafés.

“My husband was like, ‘Gacia, you can’t [spend that much].’ And I was like, ‘No. You don’t understand,’” she says with a laugh. “So I did a bunch of research. I bought a Behmor Roaster [a little toaster oven coffee roaster], put it in my garage, roasted my own coffee, bought my own espresso machine and made my own coffee.”

Tachejian shared her freshly brewed cups with friends and family— one of her favorite ways to show love. Her former boss at UCLA, where she was a project manager for clinical trials in behavioral health, was fellow coffee connoisseur and biopharmacologist Marisa Briones. Briones was so impressed, she shared it with her husband, Paul Burgis.

Burgis is the former COO and CFO of Los Angeles–based Golden Road Brewing, a craft brewery acquired by Anheuser-Busch InBev in 2015. In 2021, with extra free time during the COVID quarantines, Briones’s encouragement, Burgis’s food-and-beverage savvy and Tachejian’s passion for quality coffee, the co-founders knew it was time to open a business—even if it started with a cart instead of a brick-and-mortar café.

They named the business Laidrey (pronounced LAID-ree) in honor of the partners’ children Leo, Aiden and Audrey. “We are a family-owned business and aim to make everyone feel like home,” Tachejian says. “It is also a legacy we hope to leave for our kids.”

They used the coffee cart as a way to build clientele and encourage the community to get outside and grab a cup of coffee. “People didn’t really understand what a coffee cart was at the time, but I think it also created a fun new activity for people to do,” says Tachejian.

Eight months later, the co-founders opened their first shop on Ventura Boulevard in Tarzana, where they still roast all the coffee beans. It’s in the same neighborhood where Tachejian’s grandparents lived when she was growing up.

Since then, Laidrey has expanded with locations in Encino and Agoura Hills.

“At first, when I opened the shop I was more concerned about bringing specialty coffee to my neighborhood,” Tachejian says. “I wanted people to taste what a natural, processed coffee could taste like. I was focusing so much on that, and I didn’t realize I was also creating a community.”

Just as community is central to Tachejian and Laidrey, so too is their sourcing. The café almost always works with passionate, female- led, equitable and sustainable coffee farms that use organic farming methods. This is important to Tachejian because women have historically done much of the work in coffee production without recognition, she says. Supporting them helps her “keep going.”

In addition to connecting with customers and roasting beans, Tachejian loves developing seasonal menu items. She admits it’s hard to ignore viral drink trends, especially in LA, but insists on putting quality first.

“For me, the quality of a product and the taste of something is the most important,” she says. “It’s always key for the coffee to come through, not just to be drowned in syrup or an alternative flavor,” she says, adding that most of the syrups are made in-house, so they aren’t overpowering or too sweet.

Looking to her Armenian roots for inspiration, she created the cardamom latte, which has been on Laidrey’s menu since the beginning. “It wasn’t even a trend,” she says. “It was just something that I grew up with. That flavor was in my household, and I thought it’d be fun to complement that with coffee.”

Laidrey Coffee Roasters also partners with the greater LA community for its food menu—bringing in baked goods daily from Larder in Culver City (delivered fresh at 4am) and quiches from Chaumont Bakery & Café.

When visiting one of the three Laidrey locations, consider ordering Tachejian’s go-to: a single-origin pour-over or a cortado. “And then for food, my two favorites are the avocado toast or the egg white spinach wrap,” she says.

While you’re at it, grab a bag of roasted beans to take home.

LAIDREY COFFEE ROASTERS
Laidrey.com
5021 Kanan Rd., Agoura Hills
17034 Ventura Blvd., Encino
18600 Ventura Blvd., Tarzana