Café Collegium

Some coffee shops are more than the sum of their food and beverage offerings, and Café Collegium is one of them. Opened at South Coast Plaza in January 2026, Café Collegium is the latest extension of shoe and apparel brand Collegium, which sold Italian-made footwear online for nearly a decade before opening physical stores in Los Angeles, Boston, and then Costa Mesa. While the cafe and store are neighbors in distinct spaces, they’re connected in the center, and best understood as two halves of a single experience. One of the cafe’s tables sits inside the store, which also has benches, a sofa, and a BMW parked in the middle of its space, but no traditional check-out counter; instead, guests buy things at the cafe’s marble bar or a small table with a tablet next to the BMW.

It’s an interesting scene – augmented by fairly frequent out-the-door lines at the cafe’s counter, due in part to staff doing triple-duty as baristas, food reheaters, and cashiers. Tired of waiting for the line to progress, members of our group abandoned two or three earlier attempts to visit before we successfully made it to the front of the line early one weekend morning.

Café Collegium’s single-page menu and pastry case would be easy to confuse with similar offerings at Korean coffee and pastry shops such as Smoking Tiger, minus any obvious Korean references. A collection of “classic coffees” are sold for $3 to $5.50, with teas, lemonade, and hot chocolate at $4 to $6, and specialty drinks ranging from $5.50 to $9. Limited-time specials are spread across that menu and posters, while shaved ice snows ($9.50 each) are available only on weekdays; pastries ($4 to $7.50) and basic hot breakfast items such as burritos and sandwiches ($9 to $11) are available daily, with a display case of croissants, danishes, and muffins that look as if they came straight from a Korean-American bakery.