Written by Jordan Michelman.
Robusta cuppings. Soup lattes. A banana co-ferment oat milk macchiato. Every flavor one encounters at the annual World of Coffee event—North America’s largest coffee trade show—tells a story and leaves an indelible memory. But nothing I tasted at this year’s event in San Diego was more delicious and distinctly pleasurable than an affogato from Little While coffee and Stella Jean’s ice cream.
I enjoyed this delicious treat during “affogato happy hour,” an activation hosted daily amidst the non-stop buzz and never-ending swag line of the La Marzocco booth. It turns out there’s a good reason for the perfection of this particular union: Little While and Stella Jean’s are sibling companies, both based in San Diego, with shared ownership by Steven Torres and Gan Suebsarakham. The ice cream brand actually came first; Little While’s coffee bar is a more recent development, and there is also a pie shop called Pop Pie that’s part of the family.
Coffee has been a focus across the years for all these businesses, as Steven Torres tells me, but now the affogato possibilities seem truly endless. To wit: the date cake shake with blended espresso poured on top, served from a Modbar, was not just my favorite taste at WOC 2026—it might just be the best affogato I’ve ever had.
I spoke with Steven Torres from San Diego to learn more.
Hey Steven—thanks so much for talking with me. Give me the lay of the land here—tell me more about your businesses, and how affogatos fit into the bigger picture of what you’re building in San Diego.
So, we own and operate a spot called Stella Jean’s ice cream. We make everything with a local dairy in Chino, and it’s really good stuff, with a focus on small-batch. Our biggest deal is nostalgia, and in creating flavors that feel memorable.
The team at La Marzocco reached out to us to see if we’d be interested in creating an affogato bar for their booth at World of Coffee. They started planning this nice and early before the show, and it was just as we were launching Little While, our new coffee bar. This is a passion project for us that came to fruition after several years of owning other businesses, and serving affogatos at the show was just the perfect thing for us to do. Stella Jean’s provided the ice cream, of course, and we used our own espresso blend, roasted in-house.
Talk to me about the flavors you offered. That date cake shake ice cream was just like, hauntingly good. I can’t stop thinking about it.
I’m glad to hear it, man. For the show, we really wanted to have a plant-based option, and so the base for that ice cream is actually coconut milk. I think the nostalgia factor here is really key. I grew up in the Imperial Valley, and I played a lot of sports—our schools would always play against schools from Palm Springs, and so on, road games you’d drive past all the signs advertising date shakes once you got near Palm Springs proper. This is all pretty close to where we are in San Diego; dates are delicious, but the flavor is also so resonant with people here.
Adding some cake to the mix helps give texture and add value to each scoop, and when you add espresso, it just works. It becomes kind of a coffee-and-brown-sugar thing.
At the show, we also served a flavor called Banana Turon Crunch—that flavor is selling like crazy at our shops, we just launched it a few weeks ago, and it’s been so popular we’ve barely been able to keep it in stock. We base that on a Filipino treat: a banana base with jackfruit jam. We caramelize egg roll papers on sheet pans, then crumble them and sprinkle them throughout.
Both of these flavors are now available at Little While as an affogato option. They were so popular at the show, we had to keep it going.
That’s awesome. How are you thinking about espresso for these affogatos? What’s your approach on the coffee side?
I think our approach is really about the blend. Our espresso blend can be enjoyed on its own, but a big percentage of the drinks we sell it in are actually milk-based. And so our blend is focused on a mild acidity, big chocolate notes, and subtle sweetness. We purposely keep the acidity a bit lower on this blend, compared to say a single-origin espresso, which we also love. Acidity is delicious in the right application—as a pour-over or a single-origin shot—but when we put anything in milk, we want the flavors to jive and not be too acidic.
So the blend is what we use for affogatos as well—it’s that same approach of pairing with milk. We’re pulling shots in our shops using a Linea PB with auto volumetrics, scales, and all the bells and whistles. At World of Coffee, we were actually using a Modbar unit, which is very similar, obviously, and we were able to dial that in no problem. It was easy to work with the LM grinders as well.
The espresso blend we’re using right now has a washed Papua New Guinea coffee alongside a very mild natural Ethiopian coffee. The Ethiopia is mellow with a lot of sweetness, and then we’re roasting not as hot into first crack, so we can develop the flavors a little more.
Little While Coffee is a coffee bar and roaster with one location based in San Diego. Follow them on Instagram.
Stella Jean’s is an ice cream shop with 8 locations across the San Diego area. Follow them on Instagram.
