Gen-Z downtown regulars, on a Friday night in the Lower East Side, coffee in hand instead of an overpriced cocktail from a packed bar. Said no one ever. Until Yaeji and Oatly turned an unassuming neighborhood café into the evening’s most unexpected ticket, sans the velvet rope. By day, Café Yaeji looked like somewhere you might wander into for an iced latte. But on opening night, once 7 p.m. hit and Yaeji stepped behind the decks, the intimate café became…the club? Yes, you read that right.
For the Korean-American artist, DJ, and producer, Café Yaeji was less another celebrity-branded caffeine fix and more a workshop in world-building. Drawing from the dabangs of Korea, cafés that historically doubled as social and cultural gathering places, Yaeji put her own spin on the format alongside culture's favorite oat milk brand, Oatly. On that not-so-ordinary night, music met Korean culture, food, and nostalgic design, nudging a curious crowd to reconsider what a Friday night coffee run could look like.
Naturally, the coffee got the Yaeji treatment, too. The Oatly Gochujang Latte paired espresso and Oatly Barista Edition with a gochujang-vanilla base, salted vanilla cold foam, and gochugaru. Sweet, savory, bitter, spicy. Not exactly standard café fare, but the combination makes more sense when you consider who inspired it. Yaeji has spent her career making music that slips between genres, languages, moods, and references without feeling the need to pick a lane. Why should a collaboration with Oatly be any different?
“With music-making, I see it as stringing together different sounds, different samples,” Yaeji says. “[With the Oatly Gochujang Latte] we’re mixing a lot of different flavors: sweet, savory, bitter, spicy.” For her, the same openness applies whether she’s working with sound or flavor. “What makes a good mix is one that’s really open-minded to combine very different things, whether that’s in music or flavors in a drink.”
Opening night played out accordingly. Guests moved between gochujang-spiked drinks and Korean bites including tteokbokki skewers, fried japchae spring rolls, and tofu bibimbap kimbap, with a retro photo booth worked into the space. Lattes still in hand, the crowd clustered around the decks as Yaeji took over. On a stretch of downtown better known for bar-hopping, Café Yaeji made a pretty convincing case for caffeinating instead.
Behind the Friday-night spectacle was something more personal. Yaeji recalls struggling to find “space for herself” while living in Korea, with cafés becoming places she could reliably retreat to. “Cafes would always be there for me,” she says. With Café Yaeji, she wanted people to find some of that same feeling, hoping the space would feel “cute and comforting.” The reference to Korean café culture, then, wasn’t simply aesthetic. It came from a place that had already played a meaningful role in her own life.
So, who better than Yaeji herself to show how cafés are more than just a place to grab a cup of coffee? No one, and Oatly knows this. It’s why Café Yaeji had to happen, not only as an ode to Yaeji’s childhood memories, but as another step in Oatly’s commitment to building collaborations that reimagine coffee culture and celebrate the people giving it a new flavor.
Café Yaeji’s Lower East Side run may have been brief, but its most unexpected flavor combination is sticking around. TOUS les JOURS is carrying the collaboration forward with its own Gochujang Caramel Latte at participating locations nationwide starting October 12 through the end of November. From gochujang to oatmilk, café to club, Seoul to downtown New York and house music to hip hop, Yaeji has a knack for putting things together that you might not expect to share the same space. Turns out, that applies to her coffee order, too.
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