What used to be an extended nursery at La Jolla flower shop Bridget’s Blooms is now one of the community’s newest coffee spots. Its pitch is simple.
“Serve good coffee — that was the whole premise of it,” said Eddie Shin, co-founder of Cup of Bloom at 1055 Torrey Pines Road. “We wanted a place that sold really good coffee that was in this cool setting.”
Cup of Bloom is the creation of Shin and Bridget’s Blooms owner Bridget Lindroth, a pair of longtime friends and La Jolla residents. Following the coffee shop’s soft opening four weeks ago, the two are preparing for a bigger grand opening.
Cup of Bloom is what the owners describe as a coffee garden, filled with plants, chairs and striped umbrellas. It offers coffee from Coffee Cycle Roasting in Pacific Beach, food from Charlotte Riley of the La Jolla-based food delivery service Enjoy and pastries from The French Gourmet restaurant in PB.
Coffee Cycle Roasting created a custom blend for Cup of Bloom that Shin said leans on the medium to darker side. Coffee Cycle founder Chris O’Brien, a former barista for Bird Rock Coffee Roasters, helps train Cup of Bloom employees to make a dependable brew.
“We strive to have a consistent espresso and cup of coffee,” Shin said. “And the way you do that is you’re pretty committed to process on how you make it.
“Generally … every shot of espresso, when it comes out of the grinder, should be 18 grams. The flow coming out of the espresso machine should be 25 to 30 seconds. And we time those things, we weigh those, just so we can have consistency and the flavor is always the same.”
Though Cup of Bloom didn’t materialize until recently, the idea had been brewing for a while.
Before 2022, a Starbucks coffee shop was next to Bridget’s Blooms’ original location. After the Starbucks closed, the flower shop moved over and kept its former space as a nursery.
With that came requests from Bridget’s Blooms customers to include coffee. One of them was Shin.
“I had a particularly busy weekend and Eddie had brought coffee one morning …and he’s like ‘You really should do a coffee shop here,’” Lindroth recalled.
She agreed, and after toying with the idea of placing the coffee location on the store’s patio, she decided to put it in the nursery.
“Once we put the coffee cart in there and people started coming in, the energy started shifting to ‘Wow, this is really where it should have been all along,’” Lindroth said.
Shin’s partnership with Lindroth came about as he sought work outside his usual business world. More than a decade ago, he quit his biotech job to take care of his parents following the death of his sister.
As he started to receive inquiries from venture capitalists and recruiters, he realized he didn’t want to return to the industry he cut his teeth in.
“When you’re in executive management, that’s a 24/7 job and there’s a lot of stress with it,” Shin said. “This has its own level of stress, don’t get me wrong, but we are pretty social people, so it’s all turned out well because I get to interact with people.”
When Lindroth and Shin agreed to take on the Cup of Bloom effort together, Shin reached out to O’Brien and former Bird Rock Coffee Roasters owner and Chuck’s Roast founder Chuck Patton to prepare for Cup of Bloom’s opening. He also connected with Jim Duke Espresso Coffee, which helped design and build the location.
Lindroth got to work on beautifying the space and forming the idea of what Cup of Bloom would be.
“He is great at connecting people,” Lindroth said of Shin. “So he was able to do all sort of the legwork of getting the cart, finding those people [and] finding our coffee distributor.
“We really do work well together because I’ll do all the employee side and the beautification and he does more of the supply control and finding the products we want to sell.”
Shin praised Lindroth for spearheading the effort and realizing her vision. Their dynamic, he added, is akin to a brother and sister — honest and sarcastic but ultimately supportive.
“I respect her immensely,” Shin said. “I’ve worked for some of the hardest-working people you would meet, and she outdoes them all. She is the hardest-working person I have ever met.”
Cup of Bloom is open from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily. For more information, visit @cupofbloom.lj on Instagram. ♦
Originally Published: July 24, 2025 at 6:42 PM PDT