For Valentine’s Day, Three Sisters Coffee & Tea teamed up with a local florist. Then a customer posted the cafe’s strawberry matcha on TikTok: pink strawberry, green matcha, and strawberry cold foam, framed by flowers. Soon there was a line outside the Burbank, California, cafe, and the team was struggling to keep matcha and strawberry syrup in stock.
It sounds like an overnight success. It wasn’t. On Episode 5 of the Menu EN Podcast, host Lani Manaseryan talks with Kristen Sagona, who started the cafe with her husband, Matt Sagona, and their daughter Lily Sagona, part of the family team behind the counter. Their story begins years before the video.
How a Family Legacy Became Three Sisters Coffee & Tea
Three Sisters Coffee & Tea exists because Kristen Sagona wanted to keep giving her community a place to gather. Her family, the Staverts, ran Pickwick Gardens in Burbank for generations. Over the years, the property included a large swimming pool, an ice rink, a bowling alley, and event spaces. Kristen worked there and expected to stay involved in the family business.
In 2021, the family decided to sell Pickwick Gardens. Kristen describes the loss as hard. The business had been part of her identity.
Rather than walk away from that community, Kristen and Matt invested in something new. Matt’s family owned a building on West Magnolia Boulevard that had once housed their upholstery business. Matt noticed the foot traffic in the neighborhood and saw an opening for a coffee shop. They converted it into a family-owned coffee shop named after their three daughters: Danielle, Lily, and Skylar.
The goal was never only to sell coffee. Kristen wanted another space where people could gather. A neighborhood business with a reason to exist beyond its menu has something to hold on to when the hard months arrive.
The Two-Year Reality of Opening a Coffee Shop
Opening Three Sisters took about two years from the time the family decided to launch it. The old upholstery shop had little of the infrastructure a coffee shop needs, so the space had to be completely converted, and permits moved slowly. The project required a significant investment, including a loan. Kristen sums it up:
“Everything always just takes more, costs more than you had expected.”
Some lessons only appeared after opening day. The placement of equipment, cups, registers, and the ice machine forced employees into extra movement on every shift. In hindsight, Kristen would have hired a contractor more experienced with permits and planned the bar’s workflow more carefully. The first year, she says, was especially difficult.
The lesson for anyone planning a cafe: plan for permits to take longer, keep cash in reserve, choose a contractor who knows the permit process, and map how your team will move behind the bar before anything is installed.
How One Strawberry Matcha Became a Social Media Success
The drink that put Three Sisters on the map made it onto the menu because Lily pushed for it.
Kristen wasn’t convinced matcha deserved a major place on the menu. Lily and her sisters disagreed. Lily loved strawberry matcha at other coffee shops and wanted Three Sisters to serve its own. She helped develop a homemade strawberry syrup, and the cafe tested several matcha brands before settling on the one it liked best.
Then came the Valentine’s Day video. Kristen admits she didn’t see it coming:
“I vastly underestimated the power of social media.”
Seasonal matcha drinks followed, including banana pudding matcha, mango sticky rice matcha, and princess cake matcha. Kristen had been hesitant about cold foam too, but she changed her mind for a simple reason:
“It’s not about me. It’s about what the customers want.”
That makes Three Sisters a useful case study in coffee shop social media marketing, partly because nobody planned the viral moment. A video can bring new customers in once. What happens next depends on the drink, the experience at the counter, and whether the team can make it consistently on a crowded afternoon. Three Sisters had done that groundwork: a recipe developed in-house, a matcha chosen through testing, and a menu shaped by customer feedback.
Why Community Relationships Matter as Much as Marketing
Some of the most valuable attention Three Sisters receives comes from relationships, not ads.
The Burbank Book Festival is the clearest example. A regular customer who had become a friend was involved in organizing it, and Three Sisters hosted the first festival in August 2024. Kristen remembers the event outgrowing the cafe almost immediately. By her estimate, more than 100 people came through. The festival has since moved to a larger venue, Burbank’s Buena Vista Branch Library, but it got its start inside this Burbank coffee shop.
Other connections run just as deep. The Valentine’s Day florist is a fellow local business. Regulars have become friends, and longtime residents recognize the family from Pickwick Gardens. Relationships like these create word of mouth that advertising can’t buy, and local partnerships put a cafe in front of people who already care about the neighborhood.
Working With Family, Hiring for Personality, and Protecting Employees
In a family restaurant business, the line between parent and manager doesn’t always hold.
Early on, Three Sisters relied heavily on family and friends to staff the counter, and Lily was balancing school with shifts. As the business grew, the team had to grow too. Kristen and Lily speak candidly about how hard it can be to work together as mother and daughter. Kristen says she wants both her daughters and her employees to feel heard.
Her hiring is just as personal. Three Sisters has hired people with no barista experience and trained them, and some employees started out as regulars. Personality matters most: warmth and the ability to connect with customers. For more on building that kind of team, see our guide to restaurant customer service training.
Kristen is equally clear about customers who cross a line:
“If they’re going to treat my staff disrespectfully, I’m going to back up my staff way before I ever back up a customer.”
That instinct shapes how she feels about online reviews. Kristen isn’t against feedback. She is frustrated by hurtful criticism when a direct conversation could have solved the problem, and she would rather customers talk to her so she can make it right. A welcoming room starts with how owners treat the people working in it.
When a Busy Coffee Shop Gets Even Busier With Online Orders
When Lani asks about technology and online ordering, the answer comes fast: “I love it and I hate it.”
Three Sisters takes orders through DoorDash, Uber Eats, and its own website, on top of the customers standing at the counter. Lily describes a moment every barista knows. The line is long. The team is working through 20 drinks. Another online order comes in for three more, and others are right behind it.
Online ordering isn’t the problem; it brings in business. The hard part is handling several order sources at once without letting service slip for customers already waiting.
How Orders.co Helps Cafes Manage Multiple Ordering Channels
Three Sisters’ experience reflects a challenge many independent cafes encounter as their popularity grows: more ordering channels can bring more business, but they also require better coordination behind the counter.
Orders.co is a restaurant POS and order management platform built for that coordination. With Orders.co order consolidation, a cafe can bring counter orders, direct website orders, and orders from DoorDash, Uber Eats, and other integrated platforms into one workflow instead of switching between separate systems. Drink tickets can print to connected printers at the bar or appear on a Kitchen Display System.
When online volume gets heavy, staff can add prep time, use busy mode on supported delivery apps, or pause online ordering. If a popular drink or ingredient sells out, the team can mark it unavailable across connected ordering platforms from one place.
None of this makes the drinks, and the line still has to be served. What changes is how much time the team spends sorting orders, which leaves more of it for making drinks and serving customers.
What’s Next for Three Sisters Coffee & Tea?
Kristen and Lily talk about growing to three locations in total, possibly roasting and supplying their own coffee beans, and maybe bottling their strawberry syrup so customers can enjoy it at home.
These are ambitions, not finished plans, but they fit the story so far. A family that lost one gathering place built another in the same city. The hope now is that what they started on Magnolia Boulevard will last for another generation.
Watch Three Sisters Coffee & Tea on Menu EN Episode 5
The full episode covers much more, especially the family relationships and real experiences behind the cafe, in Kristen and Lily’s own words.
Visit Three Sisters Coffee & Tea: threesisterscoffee.com
Address: 1706 W Magnolia Blvd, Burbank, CA 91506
Instagram: @3sisterscoffeeandtea
About Menu EN
Menu EN is an English-language podcast sharing real stories from restaurant owners, chefs, and food entrepreneurs. Through honest conversations about building businesses, working through challenges, and learning from experience, the podcast offers inspiration and practical insight for people working in hospitality or thinking about starting a business of their own. Menu EN is hosted by Lani Manaseryan and powered by Orders.co.
Catch up on every episode in the Menu EN podcast archive, including Chef Ara Zada’s story on Episode 4, and watch full conversations on the Menu EN YouTube channel.
Follow Menu EN:
