Co-founder Ally Walsh turns a childhood memory into a business staple while navigating a year of personal upheaval and relocation.
The ritual is precise: thick bread, almond butter, a pinch of salt, and a drizzle of olive oil. It is a quiet. daily connection to a mother who has passed. but at Canyon Coffee. it has become something more. The toast recipe. once prepared in a home kitchen. is now a menu staple that draws customers in consistent. winding lines.
Ally Walsh co-founded the roaster and cafe business with Casey Wojtalewicz in 2016. but the past year tested the foundation of that venture. In January 2025, Walsh and her son were forced to evacuate their Altadena home as the Eaton fire threatened the region. Soon after that displacement, she lost her mother to ovarian cancer.
For months, Walsh and her son moved between more than a dozen different living spaces. Throughout the instability, the business remained the one constant, sustaining its operations even as the world around her shifted. She finally found a place to settle in a Mount Washington home last October. “It was a whole new start, and that’s what it felt like I needed,” she says of the move.
Her resilience translated into tangible growth for the brand. Canyon Coffee operates locations in the trendy Echo Park neighborhood and in Brooklyn’s Prospect Heights, where the pace is unrelenting at roughly one order per minute. A new site in El Sereno is scheduled to open this month.
It is the convergence of professional momentum and private endurance: as the business expands its footprint across coasts and city districts, the menu carries the weight of the kitchen table where it all began.
Ally Walsh Canyon Coffee business resilience toast food industry