On Saturday, May 3, the line at Witness Coffee Roasters (734 Fifth St., Eureka) went back to the door emblazoned with the words, “You’re exactly where you’re supposed to be.” It was also mostly comprised of people with homemade signs in hand. “No Kings,” one reads. Located across from the Humboldt County Courthouse, the staff has grown accustomed to the rush of customers that accompany the big protests against the Trump administration and its policies since the rallies started weeks after the café’s opening in March.
“It’s been great. We love it,” says owner Bozant Katzakian. “It’s really beautiful and moving to see people out there protesting, mourning and expressing themselves … We put Rage Against the Machine on in here and there’s 40 people getting coffee, and it’s a whole vibe.”
Katzakian grew up in Linden, near Stockton in California’s Central Valley. After studying wine at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, he says, “I started working at a winery and was working in a cellar, and was like, ‘This is not for me.'” For a handful of years, he says he pursued comedy, working at coffee places in daylight hours to pay rent.
At Stumptown Coffee Roasters in Los Angeles and Chicago, Katzakian says the strong training program got him into the finer points of brewing and roasting. By the time the pandemic locked the country down in 2020, he was learning the ropes from a roasting pro on his own time and turning out micro batches of beans and thinking about opening his own café. Roasting was mostly a hobby for him, he says, so he sold his coffee priced to cover his costs, which were low since he was using borrowed space and equipment, and donated to causes that spoke to him, like relief for Palestinian children and aid to Artsakh.
After returning to the Central Valley, Katzakian and his partner Ashley Lane took a trip to the North Coast, which he’d visited before and loved. Lane had never seen the redwoods, so they came up. She was awed and plans for Witness Coffee Roasters shifted north.
Katzakian says Lane, who has a background in set design, steered the interior design changes to the former Grind Café (a branch of which remains inside the courthouse), adding touches of brass and dark velvets to the space, where one can also thumb stacks of vintage vinyl records. Meanwhile, he focused on the coffee, building a roster of single-origin coffees, like the Finca Arashi from Ecuador, listed on the menu with its grower Abel Salinas, its varietal and elevation, as well as the roaster and tasting notes (strawberry jam, red currant and floral). His own roaster, he says, is sitting in the wings cold while he gets settled.
Some exciting coffee is coming out of China, Katzakian says, and he’d love to serve Mexican coffee, but with wholesale prices already rising (as much as 30 percent in the case of one supplier), he is waiting to see the impacts of tariffs. “A lot of the coffee that I’m serving is already in the U.S.,” where it’s roasted, he notes, so increases may take a little time to show up.
Tea, coffee and espresso specialty drinks run from cappuccino to cold brew lime tonic, all of them plant-based, swapping black strap molasses or agave for honey, and nut, oat and soy milks for dairy. The Mist in the Trees, an Earl Grey tea with vanilla bean simple syrup is well paired with oat milk, barely sweet and romantically fragrant sipped on the green loveseat in the little alcove off to the side ($5.75, 12 ounce).
“I felt like there was a little bit of a hole in the market,” says Katzakian, who’s been eating a vegan diet for 13 years. Aside from Arcata’s Wildflower Café, which supplies pastries for Witness, he’s found few local eateries offering a full menu of plant-based dishes to choose from. It’s his hope to offer patrons the same comfort foods he enjoys, like avocado on a slab of toasted Brio bread with sprouts and buzzy yuzu salt ($8.50) and breakfast burritos with potatoes, vegan eggs, sausage and cheese ($9). The biscuits ($4) he bakes in-house with his own recipe, cutting a cashew butter into the flour and boosting the rising with apple cider vinegar. The final product is layered and light, flavorful and just a little crustier from the convection oven.
The name of the café is inspired by Katzakian’s own “personal development work” and the Buddhist concept of the “witness to the self,” observing things as they are without judgement, he explains. “It’s a really empowering place to make a change from.” In 2020, as he was focusing on that work, he was looking out at the societal shifts of the Black Lives Matter movement, the witnessing of suffering on a societal level and its power to make change. It took his focus to how bearing witness could create change on the individual and the macro level. Katzakian finds the idea hopeful, saying, “If we do that for ourselves, we can do it for others and we as a society can do it.”
The café, he hopes, offers a quiet place for reflection, as well as food and drink. “Coffee is an opportunity to witness, to come back to ourselves, have a sip of coffee and just be there,” he says.
Though there’s little time for reflection when the crowds from the street pour in from the protests of a given Saturday. But Katzakian isn’t complaining. He laughs as he says, “I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be, I guess.”
Jennifer Fumiko Cahill (she/her) is the arts and features editor at the Journal. Reach her at (707) 442-1400, or jennifer@northcoastjournal.com. Follow her on Bluesky @jfumikocahill.bsky.social.
This article appears in Summer of Fun 2025.