Two men who had both won the United States Barista Championship opened a coffee stall in a downtown market hall, and the thing they became known for was not espresso. It was an almond-macadamia milk they make themselves, poured into a latte, and it has quietly rearranged what a lot of Los Angeles expects a milk drink to taste like. Go Get Em Tiger — everybody writes it GGET — is now a group of neighbourhood coffee bars, and the house nut milk is still the reason most people are in the queue.
GGET's locations behave completely differently — some are all-day kitchens, some are a counter and a bench. Ask Karpo which one is closest to you and what it actually serves before you drive.
Where it came from
Kyle Glanville and Charles Babinski both came out of Intelligentsia's Los Angeles bars and both hold national barista titles, which is an unusual founding story even by speciality-coffee standards. Their first project together was G&B Coffee, a stall inside the Grand Central Market downtown that opened in 2013 and did something almost nobody was doing at the time: no tip jar, no upselling, no ceremony, and a menu with a small number of very deliberate drinks on it. Go Get Em Tiger followed on Larchmont in 2015 and became the format that scaled.
What carried over is a house style that reads as slightly austere until you drink it. The bars are pale and plain, the menus are short, the staff are unusually well trained, and there is no attempt to make you feel like you have entered a temple. Coffee is served quickly and correctly and you get on with your day.
The almond-macadamia latte
Order it once and you will understand why it has its own following. The house nut milk is made in-house from almonds and macadamias, and macadamia is the part that matters — it is fattier and sweeter than almond, so the milk has body instead of the thin, chalky quality that plant milks usually bring to espresso. Poured over a dark, sweet shot it produces something closer to horchata than to a standard latte, and it is sweet enough that people who take their coffee black often find it too much.
If that is not what you want, the flat white on regular milk is the clean reference order and the filter coffee is where the more interesting single origins turn up. There is usually a rotating seasonal drink of some kind, and unlike at most places it tends to be a genuine idea rather than a syrup.
The locations are not interchangeable
This is the single most useful thing to know about GGET and the thing that most often goes wrong. The sites vary enormously: some are full all-day operations with a real kitchen doing eggs, grain bowls and sandwiches; some are essentially a counter and a bench with pastries; some have generous outdoor seating and some have none at all. Turning up at a coffee-only site expecting brunch is a common and entirely avoidable disappointment.
The pattern that works: decide first whether you want a meal or a coffee, then pick the branch. The larger sites are worth building a morning around. The small ones are worth a detour of about four minutes and no more. Because the group has opened, moved and closed sites over the years, checking the current list before you drive across the city is genuinely worth the thirty seconds.
What to eat, where there is food
At the sites with a kitchen, the food is genuinely good and is built around the same restraint as the coffee: a short list, done properly, changing with what is around. Eggs on toast with something green and sharp on it. Grain bowls that are not sad. A breakfast sandwich that holds together. It is priced like a real breakfast rather than like a café afterthought, which is the honest trade — you are eating a small restaurant's cooking, not a pastry case.
The pastry programme is the other half. Croissants and morning buns come from bakeries that the group works with rather than from a central commissary, and the case turns over fast enough that by early afternoon the best things are gone. If a pastry is the plan, that is a before-eleven decision.
The no-tipping thing
The founders have been publicly associated with paying staff a proper wage and building that into the menu price rather than relying on tips, and it has been part of the company's identity since the G&B days. In practice this means the price on the board looks slightly higher than at a comparable café and the total at the end is not. It also means the counter interaction is different — nobody is performing at you, and asking a genuine question about what is on filter gets a genuine answer rather than a sales pitch.
How to use it
For a first visit, take the almond-macadamia latte and something from the pastry case, sit down, and decide from there whether you want a second, plainer coffee. For a working morning, find one of the larger sites with tables and treat it as a café rather than a takeaway window. For a genuine comparison of what the roaster is doing, order a filter and drink it without milk.
And if you are downtown, the original G&B stall inside the market hall is still the most interesting version of the idea — a bar with no seating at all in the middle of a very loud, very old food market, which is a much stranger and better place to drink a carefully made coffee than a quiet room.
Practical notes
Go Get Em Tiger operates several coffee bars across Los Angeles, and they are not the same: some are all-day kitchens with full food menus, others are counters with pastries only. Check which format the nearest one is before you go. The house-made almond-macadamia milk latte is the signature and is noticeably sweet; the flat white and the rotating filter are the cleaner orders. Prices include proper staff pay rather than relying on tips. Mornings before nine are the busiest at the neighbourhood sites; mid-afternoon is calm almost everywhere. The original G&B counter inside the downtown market hall remains the most distinctive of the group.
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Ask Karpo first
Want to know which Go Get Em Tiger is nearest, whether it does food or only coffee, and how busy it is right now? Ask Karpo for a live read on the closest branch, what is on filter this week, and a good second option if the queue has spilled onto the pavement.
