Coffee Alley

Tuesday, January 31, 2012

I'm back to terrorize you with midnight snack cravings! You're welcome.

The week before the Chinese New Year break, my friend and I went to check out the pre-New Year sales at the bigger department stores. While there, we decided to have dinner at a place called Coffee Alley (3rd floor of the ATT 4 FUN building, No. 12, Song Shou Road ... in case I have any readers from Taiwan and/or any of you ever visit Taipei).

My friend wanted me to try one of their more creative concoctions, which is a plate of cotton candy and ice cream over which you pour hot coffee, but since it was dinner time and I wanted real food and real sleep that night, I opted for something a little more traditional.

My friend pretty much always orders a fruit tea when we go out:


Fruit tea doesn't sound all that enticing, but it actually tastes much better than it sounds. Although it must have a tea base, it barely tastes of tea at all. I've tested several of my friend's fruit teas, and they are always overwhelmingly passion fruit-flavored, with various additions (all real fruit) such as apples, oranges, berries, kiwi, pineapple, etc. It really is delicious, and they almost always come in really large carafes so that it's actually 3 or 4 servings rather than just one. These fruit teas can be served either warm (or room temperature, I'm not quite sure) or chilled/over ice. The fruit tea carafe at Coffee Alley was about $5.33.


I chose an iced peach jasmine tea drink ($4.66) ... it was really, really tasty.


We decided to choose one sweet dish and one savory dish to share. Here is the peanut butter and condensed milk waffle ($4). The other waffle options included strawberry and strawberry ice cream, banana and chocolate syrup, etc. This one was the most unique. We were both afraid that it would be too sweet, but it actually wasn't. The peanut butter was American-style (a.k.a. not overly sweet), so the condensed milk (also not too sweet) balanced it out well. I probably wouldn't order it again just because waffles never tend to be as good as they look, wouldn't you agree?



The savory dish wasn't as special: we got the club sandwich with Doritos and egg salad ($5). Now that I'm typing out all the prices, it's kind of ridiculous that the drinks were more expensive than the food, but oh well, the drinks really were that good. The sandwich was pretty good, but the standout for this dish was definitely the egg salad.

The service was fine, nothing exceptional or exceptionally bad. The decor was nice and modern, and very clean. In general, the service I've experienced in Taipei has been fairly good. Between the two of us girls, we couldn't finish either of our dishes, so what they say about portion sizes in the U.S. being larger than the rest of the world is a MYTH! Maybe only in Texas. (Then again, I'm from New York City where it's sometimes acceptable to pay $30 for a pea-sized appetizer.)

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