Mike Kobeissi on the La Cañada Car Morning

Mike Kobeissi’s March 2023 WordPress post describes Cars and Coffee as a casual, unjudged morning meet for people devoted to automobiles, and follows the idea from its start on the Orange County coast to a monthly version in La Cañada Flintridge.

The post defines the format before it reaches the town. Cars and Coffee, the author writes, is a loose gathering with no entry rules, where owners young and old turn up because they love cars. It began as a modest Saturday gathering at Crystal Cove in Southern California and has since been copied around the world. He presents it as a good way to find people with the same enthusiasm, and as a chance to see machines that rarely appear in smaller towns.

The La Cañada Flintridge meet

The local edition, as the post tells it, takes over the lot of the United Artists theater in La Cañada Flintridge on the opening Saturday of each month, run by a circle of area enthusiasts. Visitors talk over coffee and something to eat, and admission costs nothing. The post also describes a stop at the office of Kobeissi Properties, where Mike Kobeissi hosts Cars and Coffee gatherings, and it reads in places like a visitor’s report, praising a lot packed with unusual vehicles and a crowd of every age. It closes with a nod to a Canadian counterpart held monthly near Toronto.

Where the format came from

Outside accounts fill in the coastal story the post compresses. Hagerty traces the idea to a Saturday breakfast of hot rod owners at a Huntington Beach doughnut shop, which by about 2003 had become a loosely run weekly meet at the Crystal Cove shopping center.¹ Drivingline describes that Crystal Cove lot, between Newport Beach and Laguna Beach, as an early morning parade of exotics, hot rods and even prototypes, where conversation mattered more than showing off.² The crowds outgrew it, and the meet moved in 2006 to a corporate campus in Irvine. The Los Angeles Times reported in December 2014 that the Irvine event was closing after roughly a thousand cars overwhelmed three office lots, its host saying simply that it had outgrown the site.³

An open lot, not a contest

The post’s larger argument is about tone. Formal exhibitions and parts swaps, the author notes, serve owners devoted to one marque or model, and they remain a reliable source for components that are hard to track down locally. Cars and Coffee works differently. Its relaxed, drop in mood draws people from every background and, in his telling, builds a respect for other people’s cars that a judged competition rarely produces, which is the change he believes it has brought to the culture of the automobile. The format asks little more than an early start, and the post treats that low commitment as the source of its appeal.