It’s rather confusing, the name of this rather cozy little café with its bright colours and the appearance of a café in Western Europe. Etched on the glass walls is the name Crème Brew Café, but there’s a board saying Café FigMint too, so one doesn’t know. There are two menus: a food menu and a beverages one, featuring teas and coffees. The latter is titled Crème Brew and the former is FigMint!
It’s an attractive little space and some of the drinks are innovative, with a mean chicken burger, but some teething troubles dog Crème Brew/Café FigMint. The drinks menu consists of coffees, mokafrappes, teas and fruit cream lattes. While the coffee menu is fairly standard, the fun is in the mokafrappe section. Mexican Spiced Cocoa consists of a hot latte blended with an imported proprietary mix. Out of all the drink mixes we tried, it was Mexican spiced cocoa that had the perfect proportion of milk to sugar and spices.
Cookies and cream (Rs 180) was another readymade mix, served cold, that was supposed to have chocolate sandwich cookies blended with Columbian coffee. Sadly I could not taste any of these. Not the chocolate cookies, not the Columbian coffee. And this time round, the drink seemed to be a bit watery. Mint Chocolate (Rs 180) which was supposed to have Dutch cocoa delicately infused with Bavarian mint resolutely hid its mint from my tastebuds. Like the coffee section, the mokafrappe subdivision too had hot and cold beverages mixed freely together, so a glance at the menu doesn’t tell you which is cold and which hot.
Thai spiced tea (Rs 135) sounded intriguing in a tea menu that treats teas like coffee, and offers tea cappuccino and tea lattes. What I got was a too-milky hot beverage with a mélange of spices in it, of which the strongest one was cloves.
The best of the entire food menu is the HB Original Chicken burger (Rs 230) consisting of a patty of minced barbecued chicken, caramelized onion and tomato with a faint hint of a delightfully strong horseradish sauce. Like just about everything on the menu, there was a mismatch between the menu and what eventually landed on our plate. In this case, there was no lettuce. Other than that, it’s a good burger, with a great bun. It is certainly far superior to the other dishes we tried. The Queen Margherita pizza (Rs 150) came soused with so much mixed dried herbs that you couldn’t taste anything else; the so called cheesy fries (Rs 180) were soggy fries that reeked of stale oil, with half a teaspoon of processed cheese on them and a crispy corn samosa (Rs 70) which was not bad at all for its ingeniousness.
Café Crème Brew does have to address several problems. Foremost of them is the size of the kitchen counter. It is far too tiny to actually take care of dish-washing, assembling cold drinks and frying/baking the snacks. The cup in which we were served our cocoa was dirty. The chairs had rather uncomfortable cushions and the smell of frying oil never left the café during the time we were there, but that is a function of a too-weak chimney.
On the plus side, there are magazines aplenty to browse through.
Ratings
Food 2.50
Service 2.50
Décor 3.00
GF08 MGF Metropolitan, A-2 Saket District Center
T:011-41084904/05/06
Open from 11 am to 11 pm
Credit cards accepted; no alcohol served
Meal for two: Rs 800
