After facing a layoff from a tech job, Lisa Maria, accompanied by her husband, Ryan Prawiradjaja, worked to figure out what to do next.
Maria was drawn to her family roots in coffee: Her parents were small coffee roasters in West Java, she says, and she wants to see Indonesian-origin coffee become better represented in the U.S.
The couple ultimately decided to launch Hijau, a pop-up coffee shop bringing Indonesian flavors and coffee to San Jose. Starting in February 2024, they sold their colorful coffee drinks at the San Jose Rose Garden and Cupertino’s De Anza College farmers’ markets.
“We were motivated because we didn’t see much Indonesian flavor represented in the Bay Area, or in the U.S. in general,” Maria says.
The couple built a menu offering three signature lattes: pandan — inspired by a tropical green plant with notes of coconut and vanilla; nastar — inspired by small pineapple tarts common in Indonesia; and klepon — named after a dessert considered the Indonesian version of mochi.
At the end of May, they put the farmers market pop-ups on hiatus as they worked to open their own brick-and-mortar location.
“Since then, we’ve been focusing our time and energy to get the shop built out,” Maria says.
But the journey to opening their own San Jose cafe hasn’t been cheap, as Maria recently pointed out in a video posted to the cafe’s Instagram account.
The video plays on the social media trend of staging the start of a Netflix documentary, in which the subject takes a seat in front of a camera while intense music plays. Maria’s video shows a stream of bills the team has received in its road to opening for permitting and inspections. The grand total? Around $27,000, she says.
“We had prepared ourselves, but we were still surprised by how much it cost,” she says.
How that compares with the costs that other small businesses take on to open a cafe or restaurant in San Jose is hard to say, according to Marika Krause, public information manager with San Jose’s Planning, Building and Code Enforcement Department. The city’s permitting fees and structures are on par with the Bay Area’s other major cities, and they largely depend on the tenant’s plans and whether changes are needed to meet health and safety requirements, she says.
San Jose does offer a program to streamline restaurant permitting, Krause says, and it has so far helped over 3,000 restaurants, in some cases shortening the permitting process timeline by half — to one or two months from two to six months — and it is expected to expand further this fall.
“We want folks to get their doors open,” she says. “If anyone is struggling, they should reach out.”
Details: Open 8 a.m.-3 p.m. Tuesdays-Fridays and 8 a.m.-4 p.m. weekends at 1432 W. San Carlos St., Suite 70, San Jose, as of Aug. 13; hijau.coffee.
