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Lennoxville's New Café

Posted by Somebody's Mother on 5:47 p.m.
The borough of Lennoxville is very much like most of the college towns that I’ve seen and we have the bars to show for it, but most college towns have a variety of daytime hangouts. Lenn, as kids affectionately call it, has McDonald’s and the drop-in centre forthe high school kids. Café Java has been a university hang out of sorts. Tim Horton’s gets a mix of folks, and now we have La Brulerie de Café.

As soon as I walked into the new café, it was like stepping into a more urban setting.
Brick walls, wood ceilings, and jazz pumping out of the sound system made it seem
like a Montreal café. One student was surfing the Internet on her laptop (I meant to ask
whether or not the Wi-Fi was free), and in the passage between the front and back rooms,
there were two computers with enormous screens being used by people also happily
surfing the ‘Net sipping on big mugs of coffee…and that’s what I was really there for.

While the ambiance was very welcome, I showed up for the caffeine. I’d heard that there
was a coffee roaster there, and that you could buy bags of Ethiopian fair trade coffee
that is a very wonderful blend of coffee. For years now, I beg my husband to go to Café
Myriade whenever he’s in Montreal to pick up a brand of coffee called 49th Parallel
which has flavourful coffee beans that are perfect for espresso or regular coffee which
we make in a contraption that we bought at Myriade called an Eva Solo. I’ve been very
excited about the fact that there is a coffee roaster within a ten-minute walk of my house,
but I’ve been too busy to get there till last weekend.

We went for lunch and coffee. Unfortunately, we showed up after 1:00. It’s important
to know that they close the kitchen at 1:00, but happily, there were some sandwiches left
which heated up were really delicious. I had a date square for dessert and my husband
had a cranberry raisin square. Both of these were really good too.

We ordered two cappuccinos. As some of my readers will remember, I was in Italy this
summer and that experience turned me into the worst kind of coffee snob. Don’t get me
wrong – I am very willing to drink bad coffee and mediocre coffee as long as there are no
pretensions involved. I was hoping for an excellent cappuccino at La Brulerie de Café,
but it wasn’t excellent. It just wasn’t strong enough and a cappuccino should be strong.
People get all caught up in the milk foam, and this is very wrong. In Italy, you get the
steamed milk and a little foam on top, because in that country, it’s all about the coffee.
The coffee is always rich and strong, and that’s the way it should be. The one that I had
at La Brulerie de Café was very drinkable but it really wasn’t strong enough.

I’m not a complete traditionalist; a true Italian would never drink a cappuccino in the
afternoon and I was happy to be able to go out for a cappuccino close to home so I’m
hoping that this will improve and that the folks at the Café will use a stronger blend. I’d
be willing to settle for a smaller cup and less milk.

My other suggestion is that the staff should walk around and clean tables. When I went
in the back to look for a cozy table, one had coffee cups still on it and just about all the
empty tables had crumbs. This doesn’t make a good impression. Apart from that I,
like all of my friends, are delighted that La Brulerie de Café has opened up a branch in
Lennoxville, and I’m hoping that it has a long run in our town.

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1 Comments

Anonymous says:

Really a nice place! I order a Macciato, and THAT was really strong! Nice place to studies!

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