The Broken Fortune Machine at Highland Park Bowl Was Never Broken

Regulars at Highland Park Bowl have been feeding coins into the same fortune-telling machine for years, the kind with the glass case and the mechanical arm that's supposed to slide out a card. It doesn't work. It has never worked, not in any way that gives you a fortune. What it actually does, if you know to push on it the right way, is swing open. Behind it sits Lucky Tiki, a full bar with beaded curtains, bamboo paneling, and drinks served in flaming mugs and small ceramic ships. The 1933 Group, the same operators behind several of LA's other hidden bars, built it into the back of the bowling alley at 5621 N Figueroa Street, and the whole point of the broken fortune machine is that it was never supposed to look like a door.

That's the shape of what's actually happening in Highland Park this year. The new stuff isn't announcing itself with a banner or a ribbon cutting. It's tucked inside buildings you've already driven past a hundred times, doing something you probably haven't clocked yet.

A Coffee Shop That Isn't Really Selling Coffee

A block over on Figueroa, Rosebud Coffee opened its second location on March 21, 2026, at 5858 N Figueroa Street, close enough to Alfred Coffee's spot at 5815 N Figueroa that the two now sit within easy walking distance of each other. From the sidewalk, Rosebud reads like any other counter-service café that's opened in Highland Park lately. It isn't one.

Rosebud is the storefront for Coffee With A Cause, a nonprofit that runs every dollar of café revenue into a paid internship and mentorship program for youth. Founder Dan Davidson told Pasadena Now that the organization picked Highland Park specifically because the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services had flagged zip code 90042, along with several neighboring zip codes, as having some of the highest numbers of referrals and open cases for foster youth in Northeast LA. The coffee shop is the visible part. The paycheck and the mentorship on the other side of the counter are the actual program.

This matters for how you read the rest of the neighborhood's new openings. A storefront on Figueroa isn't automatically a bet on foot traffic or a chain testing the market. Sometimes it's a nonprofit that ran the zip code data before it ran the espresso machine.

From a Backyard Grill to the Super Bowl Stage

Four blocks from the A Line's Highland Park station, in a strip-mall room at 5455 N Figueroa, Villa's Tacos still opens at noon every day, and there are still twenty people in line before the doors actually move. That line has been building since 2023, when chef and owner Victor Villa opened his first brick-and-mortar. Before that, the whole operation was a grill, a table, and a canopy in his grandmother's Highland Park backyard.

Two years after opening that first storefront, Villa was on stage at the Super Bowl LX halftime show. He told Metro's blog afterward that the moment was about honoring immigrant parents and the taqueros of Los Angeles, and traced it back to advice his grandmother gave him when he told her he wanted to open a business: work hard, it won't be easy, but cook with love. Villa's Tacos has since picked up a Michelin Bib Gourmand and won LA Taco Madness three times, in 2021, 2022, and 2024. Three additional locations are expected to open this year.

None of that changes what the taco stand actually is on a Tuesday afternoon. It's still the same strip-mall counter, the same line, the same menu that got him there in the first place. The Super Bowl stage is a fact about the neighborhood, not a change to the neighborhood.

The One Night It All Lines Up

Highland Park runs on two commercial streets that don't usually talk to each other. York Boulevard handles dinner and staying out late. Figueroa handles the errands: the taco order, the coffee, the bowling league. Most nights, if you're on one street, you're not thinking about the other.

The second Saturday of every month breaks that pattern. The NELA Art Walk runs from 7 to 10 p.m., organized out of 5052 York Blvd by NELAart, and for those three hours galleries and cafes stay open late across both corridors at once. It's the one recurring night when a walk that starts at a gallery on York can end at Highland Park Bowl on Figueroa, and Lucky Tiki's fortune machine, Rosebud's counter, and the line outside Villa's Tacos are all reachable inside a single loop instead of two separate errands on two separate streets.

The Art Walk itself isn't new. What's changed is what it now connects. A year ago, walking that loop meant galleries on one end and dinner on the other. This year it means passing a bowling alley with a working secret bar in the back, a coffee shop that's actually a youth employment program, and a taco counter with a Michelin nod and a Super Bowl credit to its name, all inside the same two-corridor walk that's been running since before most of these openings existed.

None of these places needed a grand opening to prove they belonged here. The fortune machine still doesn't tell fortunes. The coffee shop still just looks like a coffee shop until you know what the receipts are funding. The taco line still moves the same way it did in 2023. The story this year isn't that Highland Park added a bar, a café, and a taco stand. It's that the neighborhood's most interesting additions are the ones still pretending to be exactly what they were before.

If you're the kind of person who notices these things before they show up on a list somewhere, Mark Mintz Real Estate Group spends as much time tracking what's actually happening inside Highland Park's storefronts as we do tracking what's for sale on them.