Coffee Alley (咖啡弄)

Cafespotting has been a culture for youngsters nowadays. Simply said, cafe culture in Taiwan is very much as booming as other parts of Asia like Singapore, Korea as well as China.

Specific for Taipei, I have done some research in blogs regarding well-known cafes and found out there are numbers of well-known places which are featured almost by every food bloggers (in casual random order):

1. Melange Cafe: it is popular as the locals’ choice, proven by its existence way back to as early as 2004.
They don’t take reservations (of course is the main reason of our most of normal people’s reluctance to pay them visit). I recently learnt that they have opened additional store in Xinyi area and installed modern system of distributing queue number. Maybe it’s time to plan to go there, partner? Yes? No? 
Favorite items: waffles, sandwich, ice drip coffee, fruit tea.

2. Dazzling Cafe: topping the chart of cafe offering Honey Toast – having known from reviews that their queue is unavoidable is the reason we went to Chin Chin Cafe to fend off our craving.
Favorite items: honey toasts.

3. Coffee Alley!

This cafe is surely one of the town’s hypes. Having a lot of branches spread all over Taipei (to-date 6 joints!) there are always queues in front of their doors even though most of the visitors have made reservation before-hand. Coming for a brunch date with my buddy H 🙂 , we still had to wait for our table for more than 15 minutes despite she making the effort to make a booking. Meaningless uh?!

Anyway their whole dining system is kinda efficient. While waiting for their tables, diners have to flip over their menus and are impelled to decide on their orders. I guess this is part of their strategies to fasten the turn-around-time.

Back to our story.

Looking at the bunch of people that were still waiting in front of the entrance we felt incredibly satisfied when finally we were called and informed our table was ready. Moving quickly into the not-so-spacious dining area at the second level, we sat down and wait for our beverages which finally came about 15 minutes later. O-yeah, similar to other cafes Coffee Alley has minimum order of a drink for each head. H ordered White Chocolate Mocha and without much consideration I decided on their Japanese Green Tea Au Lait.

White Chocolate Mocha

White Chocolate Mocha

 

Japanese Green Tea Au Lait

Japanese Green Tea Au Lait

H mentioned her Mocha was really nice and she loved it! Mine was okay – quite fun to play with the tiny hand mixer although I was unsure of the use why they provided that along with my drink  😛

For the food, we ordered 3 kinds to share: their favorite Waffle with Fresh Strawberry and Strawberry Ice Cream, Strawberry Mille-Feuille, and Smoked Chicken Toasted Pizza. Waffle was very fulfilling, as in my opinion Taiwanese waffle is so much different compared to Belgian waffle. Waffles here in Taiwan were heavy and doughy, more like.. I don’t know, cake? I still prefer Belgian light waffle – Geláre, when are you expanding to Taipei?  

Waffle with Fresh Strawberry and Strawberry Ice Cream

Waffle with Fresh Strawberry and Strawberry Ice Cream

Strawberry Mille-Feuille was petite: 3 layers of tiny-squared-pâte feuilletée pastry with sliced strawberries in between! Haha but it tasted nice, I still want to have more (or maybe it is the intentional effect of the small portion). Next time I should try the other mille-feuille, the one with fruits and frozen yoghurt.

Strawberry Mille-Feuille

Strawberry Mille-Feuille

Last savoury order (we insisted having this one to balance sweetness of our two other items) was Smoked Chicken Toasted Pizza, which in the end we couldn’t touch it, even for a bite! We were too full, and maybe also too greedy to have ordered 3 menus :mrgreen: So we had it brought back as take-away. No comment on the pizza as we didn’t taste it right-away upon being served, but I love the egg mayo salad (it reminded me of Subway Singapore’s Egg Mayo sub 😥 ).

Smoked Chicken Toasted Pizza

Smoked Chicken Toasted Pizza

While we were eating and chatting, we noticed most of the people there ordered their hot fruit tea. We agreed that it looked nice, maybe will try it next time – surely there will be another chance for us to return in our stay in Taiwan right?  😉

 

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