There is a particular kind of Southern California morning that only exists before eight. The marine layer is still sitting on everything. The light is flat and grey and will be gone in an hour. Somewhere in a parking lot, a man in a fleece is warming up an air-cooled flat-six because he has been told, repeatedly, not to rev it, and he is complying in the most conspicuous way available to him.
This is the best thing about living here and almost nobody outside of it understands why.
Cars and Coffee is not a car show. A car show has judges, categories, a fee and a trophy. Cars and Coffee has a parking lot, an unspoken start time, and a rule that everyone leaves before the shops open. It is closer to a farmers market than a concours, and like a farmers market the point is not really the produce.
The one we actually get up for
Morning Shift, at the Porsche Experience Center in Carson. Nine to eleven, select third Sundays, on nineteen-thousand acres of tarmac that normally costs money to drive on.
It should be insufferable. A manufacturer-run event, at a manufacturer-owned facility, named with the sort of pun a marketing department is very pleased with. And yet it is genuinely lovely, for one reason: they pour proper coffee, for free, with actual baristas standing in a parking lot at nine in the morning making drinks for people who did not pay to get in.
It is not all Porsches, either, whatever you have been told. Turn up in a tidy Miata and nobody will ask you to leave. That, more than anything, is the test of whether one of these things is any good.
The rest of the circuit
Donut Derelicts, Huntington Beach. Magnolia and Adams, Saturday mornings, roughly half six to half eight, and it has been happening since about 1986. No rules, no fee, no prizes, no flyers, no website worth the name. It is the oldest of them and still the purest — hot rods and lowriders and someone’s immaculate Grand Wagoneer, in a doughnut shop car park, at an hour that filters out anybody who is not serious. Bring your own coffee. Genuinely.
Supercar Sunday, Pierce College in Woodland Hills. Seven to ten, themed most weeks, and considerably shinier than Huntington. If Donut Derelicts is a farmers market, this is a showroom that happens to be outdoors. Worth it for the sheer variety, and the Valley in early light is its own argument.
And then the ones that come and go — a lot on a Sunday in the South Bay, somebody’s cafe in San Clemente, the Petersen’s breakfast gatherings. The circuit reorganises itself every few years. Meets end. People move. Someone starts another one in a different car park and the same forty cars turn up.
Why we care about this at all
Because it is the same instinct. Somebody spent eleven years getting a thirty-year-old car exactly right, and the reward is that forty strangers look at it for a total of about nine minutes on a Sunday morning. Nobody is making money. Nobody is being judged. The whole thing runs on the assumption that doing something properly is its own reason.
Which is, more or less, the argument for grinding your own beans.
Bear State was born about fifteen minutes from Donut Derelicts. The landing page of this website has a lifeguard tower on it from the same stretch of sand. None of that is a coincidence — this company came out of a specific idea about Sunday mornings in Southern California, and the idea was that they are worth taking seriously in a completely unserious way.
Get there early. Bring a thermos. Leave before the shops open.