LOS ANGELES – At Locol, the “revolutionary fast food” chain that opened last year by the chefs Roy Choi and Daniel Patterson, good coffee doesn’t have to be pricey. The New York Times writes that Locol charges just $1 for a 12-ounce coffee (hot or iced), or $1.50 with milk and sugar.

“There’s an extreme democratization that I really want to make happen in coffee,” said Tony Konecny, who heads up Locol’s coffee operation, adding that good coffee should be made available to a broad audience and not just a “self-selecting group” of epicures. Locol partnered with Konecny over a year ago to help launch the chain’s gourmet coffee concept.

“Coffee still thinks that mass appeal is a sign of selling out and inauthenticity, but everybody wears Levi’s. … [I] think contemporary coffee has failed to find the consumers it should be finding,” he told the NYT.

Locol has plans to bring its coffee brand, called Yes Plz, to coffee windows and stand-alone shops in addition to supplying the QSR’s three locations.

Konecny’s ambitions for Yes Plz go beyond selling high-quality coffee at an affordable price point. He also wants to shift the current coffee culture in the United States, telling the NYTimes that he has zero patience for what he calls the “culinary burlesque” of pour-over bars, with their solemn baristas and potted succulents. “It’s dress-up,” he said, adding that it also sends the wrong message: that good coffee must be expensive and fetishized.

“We have become overly focused on this ingredient preciousness, single-origin puritanism,” Konecny told the news source, noting that coffee keeps getting fancier.

While supportive of Konecny’s move to change the coffee culture, some feel that the $1 price point may be going too far.

“My worry is that this will reinforce the idea that specialty coffee is inherently overpriced, when it’s the opposite,” Charles Babinski, a co-owner of G&B Coffee and Go Get Em Tiger, in Los Angeles, told the Times. “The best coffees in the world cost nothing when you compare it to the best beers or a fancy glass of wine, and the margins that businesses take on coffee are smaller than you’re going to find in a bar.”