Richardson has a new La La Land drive-through coffee shop - The Dallas Morning News

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La La Land Kind Cafe, the cheery coffee shop with the can’t-miss-’em yellow cups, has opened a drive-through in Richardson. Staffers started selling lattes and matcha teas on Monday, Sept. 12, 2022; they’ll be fully open by Saturday, Sept. 17, 2022.

La La Land is one of North Texas’ most high-profile indie coffee shops. It was featured on a segment of the Netflix show Selling Sunset and has a quarter of a million Instagram followers. When the first one opened near Greenville Avenue in Dallas, its 23-year-old entrepreneur made headlines for hiring foster kids looking for jobs in Dallas. (The company still employs foster youths at one location in each city, but the remainder of the stores do not follow the same program, he says.)

Founder Francois Reihani says this new drive-through is not about coffee. It’s about “normalizing kindness,” a company buzzphrase.

Francois 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's pictured here in 2021 talking to U.S. 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 was reinvented as a coffee shop that looks like a house, not a business.

Reihani, now 26, tosses out rhetorical questions to prove the mission of his Kind Cafe. “How can we touch someone?” he says in a Dallas Morning News interview. “Why is humanity so disconnected? Why aren’t all humans friends?” The staff at La La Land aims to shower customers with kindness.

“Our intention is for them to drive off and say, ‘What just happened? Why aren’t all human connections like that?’”

La La Land has been posting these videos on Instagram:

The Richardson shop is La La Land’s first drive-through. It’s Reihani’s eighth store nationwide and the fifth in Dallas-Fort Worth.

Reihani has plans to expand internationally someday. And he wants to “move quickly” stateside, to bring this pie-in-the-sky business to cities outside of Dallas, though he wouldn’t say where or how many.

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

“We’re not working every day to just 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. I actually love the art of coffee. But it’s not why we do this.”

They’re normalizing kindness, he reminds.

He dares you to go get a free a smile — and, yes, some coffee — at the drive-through in Richardson.

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

For more food news, follow Sarah Blaskovich on Twitter at @sblaskovich.

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