Tag Archives: coffee house

THE DAILY BREW BREWS UP A NEW PARTNERSHIP

Foreword by Stan Lerner: the following article will appear in the next edition of the Montebello Spotlight. For those of you not familiar, Montebello, which means beautiful hills in Italian, is a suburb of Los Angeles about eight miles east of Downtown or just east of East LA. And Montebello is also my hometown, the place where I dreamed many of the dreams I’ve been so blessed to pursue—I’ve always had dreams about returning to the place of my youth and doing business there. The following article is about that. My business savvy friends may want to pay particular attention to this little piece, as the last two places I took an interest in, Palm Springs and Downtown LA, fifteen years ago, went on to do pretty well.

THE ARTICLE

The Daily Brew, located at the corner of Montebello Blvd. and Cleveland Ave, has brewed up a dynamic new partnership. Having recently celebrated its one-year-anniversary as the neighborhood’s local coffee house The Daily Brew, founded by Veronica Diaz, is now officially The Daily Brew LLC, which is owned and operated by Miss Diaz and new partner Stan Lerner.

Mr. Lerner, is best known as an award winning author of books, movies, Las Vegas shows and blogs (He owns downtownster.com), but among the world of business elite he has also earned a reputation as a master business plan writer and turn-around specialist. And yes, he is born and raised in Montebello. “I’ve been blessed in my life to be able to pursue many of my dreams, but the one that’s been on my list longer than I would have liked it to be is the opportunity to come back to my hometown and build a company—a Montebello based company,” Lerner said. “It’s funny because I was a Daily Brew customer, I’d come have a coffee and do some work on my computer whenever I was visiting my home in Montebello, so when the opportunity presented itself I didn’t have to think about it at all—I just said, ‘Let’s do this.’”

Since the formation of the new partnership The Daily Brew has been aggressively implementing a new Best In Class Mission Statement. Lerner, who has owned successful restaurants in the past, has a passion for food and has always enjoyed creating new dishes for both his and his friend’s restaurants. Continue reading THE DAILY BREW BREWS UP A NEW PARTNERSHIP

THE LOS ANGELES BOOK FESTIVAL

The Los Angeles Book Festival named “Sweet Mary” by two time Pulitzer Prize Winner Liz Balmaseda its 2010 Grand Prize Winner—congratulations Liz! My novel “Stan Lerner’s Criminal”, as it did at the London Book Festival received the First Honorable Mention. So “Criminal” has now won the Grand Prize at the Hollywood Book Festival and received the First Honorable Mention at both the London and Los Angeles Book Festivals—not so bad for a UCLA dropout, I suppose. In the case of the London Book Festival I wrote a blog that explored my feelings with respect to my expectations of always having to win and ultimately the journey of writing and publishing “Criminal”. If you haven’t read my London Book Festival blog please do so, because the words I am now hoping to conjure up won’t be of the recycled variety.

The results were announced online (Feb 25th 2010) as I sat at my favorite coffee house in Montebello, a suburb of LA and my hometown. A few days earlier I had just returned from the continuation of my much written about journey “Road To Nowhere”. This time the “Road To Nowhere” had picked back up in Missoula Montana and gone as far as Washington DC—I had been planning to write about this affair of the road until the moment the news of “Criminal’s” most recent festival result appeared on my screen. Happily, I did not experience the angst previously described in my London Book Festival blog, rather I felt, for lack of a more literary term, relaxed—basically I’m okay with things these days.

Yes, it would still be nice if the publishing establishment and big booksellers could find a way to work with artists such as myself that don’t exactly fit any kind of mold or formula. And it would be great if the motion picture studios and or production companies sought out award winning artists and their works, instead of relying on simply what’s fed to them by a few powerful agencies that can throw in a star or two as part of a package. And as I mention these major shifts of paradigm I would like to see happen one day, I can’t help but to think of a recent article in the Los Angeles Downtown News, which focused on downtown’s writers, it had a nice picture of them at Metropolis Books on Main Street (I’ve done two reading at this store, lived downtown for fifteen years, and have won more awards than the entire group combined.)—no picture or mention of Stan Lerner though. And I mean this genuinely from my heart—it’s okay. I don’t understand it, but I’m okay with it… Continue reading THE LOS ANGELES BOOK FESTIVAL