La La Land Kind Cafe opens first drive-thru cafe in Richardson

La La Land Kind Cafe, the cheerful cafe with the can’t-miss yellow cups, has opened a drive-thru in Richardson. Employees began selling matcha lattes and teas on Monday, September 12, 2022; they will be fully open by Saturday, September 17, 2022.

La La Land is one of the hottest independent cafes in North Texas. He was featured on a segment of the Netflix show sell sunset and has a a quarter of a million Instagram followers. When the first opened near Greenville Avenue in Dallas, its 23-year-old entrepreneur made headlines by hiring foster kids looking for jobs in Dallas. (The company still employs foster kids at one location in each city, but the rest of the stores don’t follow the same schedule, he says.)

Founder Francois Reihani says this new drive-thru isn’t about coffee. It’s about “normalizing kindness,” a corporate buzzword.

François Reihani, left, created La La Land Kind Cafe when he was 23 years old. Now 26, he wants to expand his business across the United States. He is pictured here in 2021 talking to US Small Business Administrator Isabella Casillas Guzman at the original La La Land on Lowest Greenville in Dallas.(Shelby Tauber / Special Contributor)

“We planted over 400 yellow flowers for you to drive through,” Reihani says. The former Great Outdoors sandwich shop has been reinvented into a cafe that feels like a home, not a business.

Reihani, now 26, throws rhetorical questions to prove his Kind Cafe’s mission. “How can we touch someone? he says in a Dallas Morning News interview. “Why is humanity so disconnected? Why aren’t all humans friends? La La Land staff aims to cover guests with kindness.

“Our intention is for them to go away and say, ‘What just happened? Why aren’t all human relationships like this?’

La La Land posted these videos on Instagram:

The Richardson Shop is La La Land’s premier drive-thru. It is Reihani’s eighth store nationwide and fifth in Dallas-Fort Worth.

Reihani intends to expand internationally one day. And he wants to “move fast” in the United States, to bring this pie-in-the-sky business to cities outside of Dallas, though he won’t say where or how many.

Talking to him is like flying off in a rocket to Happytown. Coffee is just the conduit for his mission, he says.

“We don’t work every day just to serve people coffee. Don’t get me wrong, I believe we serve the best coffee in the world,” he says: “We flew to Colombia and did a two-week tour just to find what we thought was the best bean. . In fact, I love coffee art. But that’s not why we’re doing this. »

They normalize kindness, he recalls.

He dares you to pick up a free smile — and, yes, a coffee — from Richardson’s drive-thru.

The La Land Kind Cafe is located at 242 W. Campbell Road, Richardson. It quietly opened on September 12, 2022. The grand opening is September 17, 2022.