Phin Smith Express – Closed

Since 2018, Garden Grove’s Phin Smith has firmly established itself as one of Orange County’s best coffee shops – obsessive over quality to the point where they’ll gladly remake any unsatisfactory beverage, a guarantee we’ve never needed to test over numerous visits. In 2025, the business expanded into a second and surprisingly nearby space by opening two conceptually separate establishments: DZO Brewing Company and Phin Smith Express, which unfortunately closed later the same year. Despite their similar names, Phin Smith and Phin Smith Express offered decidedly different experiences during breakfast and lunch hours, while DZO Brewing is a lunch and dinner restaurant with a very heavy emphasis on beers.

While Phin Smith pitched Express as a way to skip the original shop’s long lines for a more streamlined grab-and-go experience – and that was true – their menus only lightly overlapped. On each of our visits, Express offered a total of three coffee drinks (Ca Phe Sua Da, Tres Leches, and Espresso Tonic), three tea drinks (Lychee Breeze, Taiwanese Jasmine, and Summer Peach), banh mi sandwiches, pastries ranging from pate chaud to croissants, and a separate counter serving a range of bottled fruit juices and made-to-order acai bowls. With fairly short lines, the total time from arrival to having drinks and/or foods in hand was roughly five minutes per counter.