A La Mirada Backyard Cafe Closed Because It Got Too Popular

California's home-kitchen rules cap sales at 90 meals a week, and Dotoree's La Mirada backyard was drawing weekend crowds.

A backyard coffee shop in La Mirada closed on June 29, two months after it opened, with the family behind it selling about 200 items a day at the end. Dotoree Coffee Roaster, run by Daniel Jung and Sun Park out of the single-family home where they live, was profiled by the Los Angeles Times after it shut.

What broke first wasn't the kitchen. It was the street. On Saturday mornings, an undeveloped stretch of Oakwood Lane filled with parked cars, and some neighbors set "no parking" signs out by their mailboxes. Michael Wong, who lives across from Jung and Park, told the Times that his wife started seeing clips of their own block turn up in her social feed.

“There was a ton of traffic, especially on a Saturday morning,” Wong told the outlet.

Dotoree held a microenterprise home kitchen operation permit — the license L.A. County issues to residents who want to cook and sell from home. State lawmakers legalized the category in 2019 after a push from the nonprofit COOK Alliance, and the county opted into the program in May 2024. It has approved more than 400 of the permits since, the Times reported. The rules are tight on purpose: no more than 30 meals a day and 90 a week, no sign on the front lawn, nothing cooked the day before, even if it's been stored properly. A home kitchen isn't allowed to scale, which is exactly what made Dotoree's second weekend a problem instead of a milestone.

Jung, a pastor at a Korean American church who immigrated from Seoul with Park in 2000, roasted Ethiopian, Brazilian and Colombian beans on a Bellwether machine and sold two house blends named for the street and the town. Park ran the food — a banana French toast, a tomato toast on sourdough from 6100 Bread in Santa Ana, a bagel with homemade bacon scallion cream cheese. Three of their five children were working the yard by June.

The end came from the homeowners association, not from a health inspector. Jung told the Times that the HOA president turned up as a customer, liked the coffee, brought his wife back — and mentioned that neighbors were unhappy about the congestion. Weeks later, Jung said, the association called and asked him to close, pointing to a rule that houses are for living in. The HOA president didn't respond to the paper's repeated requests for comment.

Jung said the county told him he could probably argue his way into staying open. He closed anyway.

“We never imagined this would happen to us, so we were unready,” he told the Times.

He isn't the first operator to find out that a viral backyard is a parking problem. Granada, a home cafe in Echo Park that opened in January, drew hundreds of people to a quiet Angelino Heights street, along with a complaint to the county, co-owner Sydney Wayser told the Times. She and co-owner Isaac Watters cut back to Wednesday through Friday so they wouldn't blow past the weekly cap. They're planning a neighbors-only party as an apology for the noise.

Jung and Park have both taken new jobs and are looking for a bricks-and-mortar space. If Dotoree reopens in the backyard, Jung said, it would run on reservations, with no more than 20 people there at once.

Source: latimes.com, retrieved September 19, 2026.