Coffee Dose

Founded in 2018 inside a hair salon before expanding to several full-fledged locations in Orange County, Coffee Dose is at this point a local rarity: an intentionally polarizing business. Most of our articles don’t focus heavily on a restaurant’s branding or marketing, but with Coffee Dose, those elements are inescapably front and center – from a pill-themed logo to window signs (“support your local caffeine dealer”) to gift cards (“drug money”) – so let’s get them out of the way first.

Across two locations in Costa Mesa (“Flagship” and “Microdose”) and one each in Irvine and Laguna Hills, Coffee Dose shops trade on the sort of rough language and drug-friendly attitude that appeals to some customers while actively turning off others. Plastic drink cups bear “anti-bitch serum” stickers and have names like “Basic Bitch” (vanilla latte) and “Puppy Crack” (whipped cream for dogs). Decor inside co-opts famous song lyrics (“you better work bitch”) to deliver barbed messages in small print (“somewhere else because we don’t have wifi”), proudly display customer complaints (“despicable people, rename your place Coffee Douche”), and ironically use neon to downplay the idea of Instagramming the space (“nothing to see here”).

This goes without saying, but it’s rare for a restaurant to give off such obvious negative vibes. When the oversized kiosk-style Stanton location at Rodeo 39 closed in early 2025 after three years, former customers and employees dogpiled the business, suggesting that the brand’s disdain for its “haters” was multi-directional. The kiosk – notably the only OC Coffee Dose serving Vietnamese-style coffee – was rapidly replaced by Here & There Coffee. (An LA location on Melrose Avenue similarly closed after several years; as of 2026, Encinitas and Palm Springs locations are in the works.)