The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf

Coffee coffee coffee medium only $2 what's not to luv! Super friendly staff.

Coffee Bean has been my favorite coffee shop for over 10 years. I feel their flavors are richer and sweeter than most other places. I have ended up meeting many friends at CB from just being a regular at multiple locations.

I love the Coffee Bean. The team is always fast and friendly. My only negative point about this location is parking. I'm always in a rush and order ahead, but I waste time looking for parking. Wish they had a spot for mobile order pick ups, but I understand that I'm Santa Monica that's asking for the impossible

tl;dr Good tea, yummy smelling food, good location, bad/annoying wifi, some what bad seating. This Coffee Bean has some ups and downs. First the good. The service was excellent! I ordered a tea and had some questions about the taste and caffeine content the barista was very informative. The tea was good and although I didn't try any the treats looked and smelt fresh. For seating you have the choice of inside or outside. Inside seating is terrible! You have four places you can sit and if anyone is next to you, you'll be battling for elbow room. However, the outside seating is nice, but only if you did not come here for studying. There are chairs lining the west and north side of the building. Why it's not ideal for studying is the loud street and hardly any cover from the sun. None the less if you are here with someone for conversation or want to people watch, its a pretty popular spot on main... and very close to the beach. One annoyance though is the wifi here, it is slow, but that is to be expected from any public open wifi. They try to minimize non-customer traffic by requiring a code that is located inside the coffee shop on the television. The fact that the code is in public view from inside the shop and that the welcome page tells you exactly where to look for this code makes this step an annoyance. If anyone near the facility wanted to leach off their wifi it would be trivial. I found myself sitting down, trying to connect, then having to get back up (with stuff in hand as I was sitting outside), looking for the code, and then walked back to my seat hoping it wasn't taken.

The space is nice and modern inside and the staff is incredibly helpful. I opted for the special of the day, a honey latte. I asked for almond milk, which they whipped out. It wasn't almond breeze, it was almond, a nice high-end almond milk.