Growing up in Michigan, misugaru was a warm, comforting drink that my Korean stepmother made for me as a treat before bed on especially cold winter nights. She called it “sweet rice tea,” which sounded amazing to my 9-year-old brain.
Misugaru is a powder blend made up of a variety of grains such as brown rice, barley, millet and black sesame. The grains are steamed, roasted and ground and served hot or cold with water or milk. Many Koreans make their own misugaru at home, but there are also a dizzying number of retail versions. It’s sometimes consumed as a meal replacement since it’s high in many nutrients.
I hadn’t thought about the drink in ages until I stumbled into Bodega Park, a sandwich and coffee shop in Silver Lake. There, chef and co-owner Eric Park serves a black sesame misugaru drink that combines espresso, oat milk, the multigrain powder and gets topped with black sesame cream. It’s nutty, sweet and frothy, but not too rich thanks to the bitterness of the espresso. The first few sips brought me right back to childhood for a moment.
“It’s like having hot cocoa or Ovaltine,” said Park.
For years, the traditional misugaru latte or misu latte, a mixture of the multigrain powder with milk, has been served widely in coffee shops in Korea. On first taste, it’s reminiscent of the cereal milk you find leftover in the bowl: grainy, sweet, somewhat nutty and uniquely delicious. In the early 2010s, Korean-born chains like Tom n Toms and Caffe Bene (both have been compared to Starbucks) brought a taste of Korean coffee shop culture to the U.S., and brought misugaru lattes along with them.
But more recently, a new crop of third-wave Korean-owned coffee shops around L.A. have been adding espresso (and in some cases creamy toppers) to their misugaru lattes. There’s Bodega Park, but other spots such as Alchemist Coffee Project, Series A Coffee, 3Thyme Coffee & Herbs and many more have been mixing up their own coffee-laden versions as well. Camel Coffee, a popular Korean chain of cafes that opened its first U.S. location in Los Feliz in June, makes its own version too.
For a dose of Korean coffee culture, here are nine of the best coffee shops around L.A. serving creative misugaru lattes.
