“We had sort of already thought of it,” Felix says of the idea that she and long-time partner Alan Cohen pioneered. “We loved the concept—people were really addicted to quick-service Mexican.”

Less so at the time on the East Coast than the West. But Felix and Cohen lived in Bethesda, Maryland, and weren’t about to move. So the partners opened their first restaurant on Cordell Avenue, across the street from Alan’s home.

Still, why the name California Tortilla in a place as far removed from the origins of the tortillas as Los Angeles is from a proper crab cake? On the East Coast,” explains Bob Phillips, one of the restaurant’s earliest customers and now its CEO, “we think of California as being cutting edge in terms of food. All the tastes and flavors seem to come from the West Coast.”

Adds Felix: “We thought it kind of conveyed freshness, an easygoing, breezy attitude—fresh and healthy and good for you. California is the burrito capital of the U.S. Until now, that is. We’re changing that.”

The first step, Felix and Cohen figured, was to create a menu of healthy, good-tasting, fresh food. The second step was to stage a series of eye-catching promotions that would attract lots of press and get the community involved.

Felix’s background in comedy helped. Many of the promotions worked so well that they’re still being used today. California Tortilla, for instance, hosts regularly-scheduled Jungle Noise Days, where anyone willing to entertain the cashier by making a jungle noise receives free chips and cheese. During the annual Pop Tart® Day, all customers, no matter what they order, receive a Pop Tart. Election Days feature free tacos for anyone who votes. And every Monday is Mystery Price Burrito Wheel Night—a spin of the wheel determines how much one pays.

“It’s turned Monday night, which used to be one of our slowest nights, into one of our busiest,” Phillips reports.

Along with specialty items like the Greek, Honey Lime, and Crunch BBQ Ranch burritos, the restaurant features its own list of 75 “hot sauces that will blow your head off” including Hollerin' Woman Hot Sauce and Dave’s Insanity Hot Sauce.

California Tortilla also publishes a monthly Taco Talk e-newsletter for 15,000 customers. In addition to comical commentaries on a variety of topics, newsletter subscribers also receive secret passwords entitling them to free chips and salsa on rainy days.

Four years ago, Felix and Cohen opened their second store in Maryland. In 2002, the partners concluded a long-running conversation with Phillips—a long-time restaurateur and, by then, devoted customer—by inviting him to sign on as CEO. The new team started a franchise program and began working toward opening several new stores in Maryland and Washington D.C. In the next 12 months, says Phillips, the company will open at least 10 more, followed by an average of 10 new stores a year.

“We want to open in great locations and, even more important, with great new people as franchisees,” Phillips says. “We really never advertise for franchisees; a few mentions have just filled the pipe lines for us.”

Most of the new restaurants, Phillips says, will be in Northeastern states—Northern Virginia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York.

 “It’s definitely the culture that’s the big thing,” Phillips says. “We really believe in having fun with the customers and employees. When you go into one of our restaurants, it’s an experience, and that’s what people take away with them. They genuinely have fun.

Will they someday open in California? He answers that question with one of his own: “Would we have to change our name?”

“A woman behind the counter, the owner, kind of shouted out, ‘Hey Marty, did you bring the money for that drink we had to give you the other day?’ I can’t tell you how humiliated I felt,” says Cox. “So I thought, ‘Hey, I can do this better with just a little common sense and some friendliness.’”

Today Cox owns five It’s a Grind coffee houses in and around his hometown of Long Beach, California. To date, he has sold franchises for 165 more in nine neighboring states and is watching them open at the dizzying rate of about three a month.

And guess what? One of the first policies he instituted in his new world of coffee grinds was that if customers don’t have the money, well, they’ll still get their drinks. “If they pay us later, great,” Cox says. “We’re on the honor system. We trust our customers.”

It seems to have paid off in Long Beach, where the first It’s a Grind opened to rave reviews in July 1995.

“I actually had some other names in mind,” Cox recalls, “but a friend said ‘Those names don’t really say coffee.  Why don’t you call it It’s a Grind or something?’ We developed a look and a feel around that, and the rest is history.”

Decorated in rich, warm colors and oversized wingback seating, the stores feature jazz paintings on their walls and an eclectic selection of jazz and blues music in their stereos. “We’re after the living room feeling,” Cox explains, “kind of an escape from the [everyday] grind. We encourage customers to come in and hang out whether they buy anything or not. We want to make these gathering places for the community. The stores are really just comfortable to be in; you want to be there. We love the music and handpick every song that plays.”

Some stores, he says, feature live music performed by local musicians whose friends and relatives come in for the show.

In addition to the six home-brewed coffee brands featured daily, It’s A Grind also serves bagels that are cut, toasted, and spread with cream cheese while the customer waits. “I made a promise that I would never force the customer to do those things with a plastic knife,” Cox says. “We do as much as we can to enhance the experience.” As for the coffee, “it has a very smooth profile. Everyone compliments us on how it tastes.”

But the thing that really makes It’s a Grind stand out from the usual grind, Cox claims, is the people who work there and the training they receive. “We are very particular in who we hire,” Cox says. “They go through a six-week training program, and the bulk of it is spent teaching them how to treat customers. If you want to boil it down to one sentence, it’s ‘Follow the golden rule.’ Our business is not taken for granted; we earn every piece of it.”

“Good coffee is here to stay,” he says. “It’s like good wine. You don’t go back to drinking bad coffee.”

Eventually Cox hopes to take It’s a Grind national. “We have the infrastructure to do it,” he says. And what of the self-declared rivalry with Starbucks, that great mother-of-all-coffee grinds? “We will certainly never beat out Starbucks,” Cox admits. “It’s the 800-pound gorilla.”

What his upstart company really wants, Cox says, is “to be the number-two coffee house in the nation, but the number-one choice.”

This certainly will take some more time at the grind.