Her Late Mom Made Her This Toast Every Day. Now Customers Line Up Around the Block for It.

After a wildfire took her home and her mom passed away from cancer, Ally Walsh found comfort serving this snack at her Canyon Coffee cafe. By Jon Small | edited by Dan Bova | Oct 06, 2026 Ally Walsh eats the same snack every day. Thick bread, almond butter, a pinch of salt and a drizzle of olive oil. Her mom used to make it for her. Now it’s one of the items customers line up for at Canyon Coffee, the roaster and cafe business she co-founded with Casey Wojtalewicz in 2016. Getting here wasn’t easy. Walsh and her son evacuated their Altadena home in January 2025 as the Eaton fire swept the region, The Wall Street Journal reports. Her mother died of ovarian cancer soon after, and the two bounced between more than a dozen places that year. Walsh kept the coffee business running through all of it. Canyon has cafes in trendy Echo Park and Brooklyn’s Prospect Heights, where she says the shop handles roughly one order per minute. A new El Sereno location opens this month. She finally landed in a Mount Washington house last October. “It was a whole new start, and that’s what it felt like I needed,” she tells the Journal. Ally Walsh eats the same snack every day. Thick bread, almond butter, a pinch of salt and a drizzle of olive oil. Her mom used to make it for her. Now it’s one of the items customers line up for at Canyon Coffee, the roaster and cafe business she co-founded with Casey Wojtalewicz in 2016. Getting here wasn’t easy. Walsh and her son evacuated their Altadena home in January 2025 as the Eaton fire swept the region, The Wall Street Journal reports. Her mother died of ovarian cancer soon after, and the two bounced between more than a dozen places that year. Walsh kept the coffee business running through all of it. Canyon has cafes in trendy Echo Park and Brooklyn’s Prospect Heights, where she says the shop handles roughly one order per minute. A new El Sereno location opens this month. She finally landed in a Mount Washington house last October. “It was a whole new start, and that’s what it felt like I needed,” she tells the Journal.