When it rains, it pours, as they say. Case in point? As if the past year wasn’t hard enough on restaurants, with the multiple closures, modified reopenings and ever-changing restrictions, Sierra Madre’s beloved coffee shop Bean Town also faced an additional unexpected hardship. Last August, in the midst of the pandemic, the café was badly damaged when a driver crashed a Jaguar into its front entrance causing the place to be yellow-tagged by the city. It has been shuttered ever since, undergoing repairs. The good news? The shop is finally set to reopen this Friday, much to the delight of locals who have been addicted to its baked goods and strong brew for decades.
Bean Town initially opened its doors at 45 Baldwin Ave. in the heart of Sierra Madre’s quaint downtown in 1990. Sandwiched between a pizzeria and a beauty salon, the café was the brainchild of locals Karen Moylan and Susan Isherwood. According to a 1993 Pasadena Star-News blurb, the duo became inspired to establish the shop upon reading a magazine article about the rising popularity of coffee houses. So they quit their respective jobs, leased a former ice cream parlor space and tried their hand at slinging java, bringing Bean Town, originally named 45 Bean Town, to life.
It wasn’t long before the place became a Sierra Madre institution and by 1993, the women had opened a second Bean Town outpost at 425 S. Myrtle Ave. in nearby Monrovia. (Fun fact – that location, which currently houses the restaurant Grey & Cash, cameoed as Nana’s in the 1999 rom-com “Never Been Kissed”!)
Though the eatery has since changed hands, it remains a local landmark 31 years after its inception. As the authors of the book “Hometown Pasadena: The Insider’s Guide” said, “We’d live in Sierra Madre just for Bean Town – it’s the perfect coffee house.”
In 1993, Isherwood told the Star-News that the café served more than 300 patrons daily. You’ll still find it bustling at most hours today – or at least you would have pre-Covid and before the August accident. Hopefully, come Friday, the site will be bustling once again.
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Image Credit: Bean Town Sierra Madre typically doesn’t see a lot of change. Idyllic and charming, the hamlet is the seeming definition of a small town. There’s not a single stoplight to be found in the scant three square miles that make up the community and the downtown consists of a mere two blocks. In a 2007 column for the Los Angeles Times, journalist Steve Lopez wrote, “Each time I drive back to Sierra Madre, I half expect the town to be gone. I figure it must have been a movie set or existed only in a dream, but there it is each time. Postcard perfect.”
The accident did bring about some changes to the face of Bean Town, though, including the relocation of the café’s front door about 20 feet to the north. The formerly recessed entrance has also been replaced with a flat set of black wood-framed windows, creating a wholly sleek, clean and modern façade.
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Image Credit: Bean Town During the reconstruction, the green awning that shaded the sidewalk out front had to be removed. Instead of chucking it, the familiar piece was transferred indoors so that, as Bean Town general manager Agueda Lopez says, “It would still feel like home.”
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Image Credit: Bean Town Other than that, though, Bean Town remains much as it did before the crash. The brick walls, exposed beam ceilings and neon signage remain. The friendly atmosphere is a holdover, as well. Current owner Matthew Krantz, who purchased the place in 2006, has long been a champion of Sierra Madre and its residents and his affable nature carries through to the goings-on at the café.
When a massive wind storm hit the San Gabriel Valley in December 2011, knocking out electricity across the region, Krantz delivered coffee and baked goods to the various city crews working on repairs. He also kept Bean Town open, powering it via generator, so that locals could still get their java fix. He explained to the Patch, “We lost some signage, we lost a light and the awning tore up a bit but other than that, we’re here. Bumps and bruises. I could sit at home and not do anything, but I’d rather be here trying to keep everybody together and keep the sense of community that Sierra Madre is basically founded on.”
And, in 2013, when a beloved barista unexpectedly passed away, Krantz not only shuttered Bean Town for two days to provide friends and family a place to gather and mourn, but he also held a fundraiser on the premises to help with funeral costs.
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Image Credit: Bean Town Considering that warm attitude, as well as its vibrant Central Perk-like aesthetic and small-town feel, it is no wonder Bean Town has been pegged to appear on both the big and small screen over the years.
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Image Credit: Universal Pictures -
Image Credit: Lindsay Blake In the 2005 sports comedy “Kicking & Screaming,” Bean Town famously portrays Phil Weston’s (Will Ferrell) café of choice. The site pops up numerous times throughout the movie, most notably in a humorous segment that anyone who has ever had to wait too long at a Starbucks can appreciate in which an over-caffeinated Phil has a breakdown over Bean Town’s long line, gets into an altercation with a fellow customer (played by “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’s” Alex Borstein) and winds up being thrown out on the sidewalk.
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Image Credit: Warner Bros. Television Bean Town was also transformed into an Italian restaurant for the season two episode of “Big Little Lies” titled “She Knows,” which aired in 2019. It is there that Mary Louise Wright (Meryl Streep) takes her twin grandsons, Josh (Cameron Crovetti) and Max (Nicholas Crovetti), for “the beeeeeesssssst pizza in the wooooooooorld.” The eatery was heavily dressed for the shoot, complete with garlic strands hanging from the ceiling, framed art lining the walls and large wooden wine racks positioned to block the view of the front counter. Between pre-production and the actual filming, the scene took a whopping four days to complete but incredibly only amounted to about 60 seconds of screen time! And despite the extensive energy spent on set dressing, little of Bean Town was actually shown in the episode. The above screen capture is the only real view audiences get of the place.
The “Big Little Lies” shoot, which took place in March 2018, simultaneously made use of Sierra Madre’s one and only Starbucks, located just up the street at 1 Kersting Ct., resulting in both cafés – the only two in the area! – being closed to the public for an entire day! Not wanting locals to have to go without, Krantz generously set up an outdoor kiosk just up the block and offered free coffee drinks to passersby during the closure! Now, that’s a café with heart!