Morning Lobby, the pink-walled San Jose café that became known for long lines of people waiting on specialty coffee and breakfast sandwiches, is opening a second, larger location at 47 E. Main St. in Los Gatos. The new café is expected to open in January 2027 and will seat about 60 people, roughly triple the original spot's capacity.
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Gatos café will keep the original restaurant's distinctive pink color palette while adding a rosy quartzite coffee bar running down the middle of the room, flanked by couches and booths on either side. A small parklet is also planned for outside the new space, which sits about a 15-minute drive from the San Jose original off Almaden Expressway.
From a 20-Seat Café to a Neighborhood Name
Morning Lobby opened its first café in San Jose last summer with room for just 15 to 20 people before later expanding its patio to seat about 40 more. Eleni Zafiris, who runs the business with her mother, Penny Zafiris, and uncle, Yanni Tsigaris, told the Chronicle that customers began posting about the café on TikTok and Instagram, and the attention snowballed from there. She said she had not anticipated the level of demand the café would attract.
That popularity traces back to a menu built around breakfast sandwiches, toasts and coffee made with beans from Saint Frank Coffee. The café's toast is made with sourdough from The Midwife and the Baker in Mountain View and can be topped with avocado, a ricotta scramble, salmon or blueberry mascarpone, while brioche sandwiches come stacked with pastrami, fried mortadella or egg-and-cheese combinations. Per Zafiris, the birria burrito — loaded with soft scrambled eggs, chives, queso chihuahua, tater tots and avocado — became the house specialty.
Coffee Program Carries Over to Main Street
The drink menu leans into the same specialty-coffee identity that built Morning Lobby's following, with a rotating selection of single-origin pour overs alongside an iced Vienna latte made with cocoa powder and sweetened cream and an iced Mont Blanc finished with orange zest and nutmeg. Matcha lattes are made without sugar by default, though sweetener is added upon request. Zafiris said she is still unsure what new menu items might appear once the Los Gatos doors open.
An earlier report from What Now San Francisco had described the original concept coming to 5011 Almaden Expressway, built around an open-concept design meant to bring baristas, the kitchen team and guests into the same environment, with an opening date not yet set at the time of that report. Tsigaris was identified in that same coverage as the concept's owner.
Why Los Gatos, and What's Still Unsettled
Zafiris said she and her family love visiting and dining in Los Gatos, and that she fell in love with the Main Street space itself. She said she hopes the new café becomes a neighborhood spot where people can grab coffee and a meal, and added that she hopes to obtain a liquor license for the location, though no application status has been confirmed.
Morning Lobby's expansion lands amid a broader wave of South Bay café openings. The Mercury News recently covered the debut of Bloom, a new brunch spot in downtown San Jose serving chicken and waffles and carnitas Benedicts, while the East Bay Times reported that Posh Bagel, a chain founded in Los Altos in 1992, opened a South San Jose location as part of a wider Northern California expansion. For now, Morning Lobby's own growth story is still centered on the same pink walls and birria burrito that first drew the crowds.
