Review - Moonstruck Chocolate Cafe

I was in downtown Portland yesterday for a meeting and decided to make my first attempt at a local coffee shop review. After walking out of the hour-long meeting, I eagerly set out to find the closest source of human go-juice I could find and guess what I found - Starbucks. Big surprise, right?

Despite fitting the target of being a coffee house, I decided to forgo doing a review of a globally franchised business since everyone who would care to read about PDX coffee houses probably already has their own opinions of Starbucks. In my mind, Starbucks is the McDonalds of coffee - it's not the best tasting, but you know what you're going to get and that sense of security and dependability can be appealing at times.

So I continued on my search in much more of a aimless wandering fashion than I suspect is recommended for such adventures, especially when it's HOT outside and you're wearing a jacketed suit. After walking a couple blocks in search of a coffee based establishment I managed to run into the Moonstruck Chocolate Cafe. The initial appeal for me was the fact that it seemed to have been shoe-horned into the line of buildings that it was a part of and seemed like a small, local coffee shop. Just what I was looking for.

In my eagerness I rushed inside and ordered their house blend drip. After pouring me a cup, the barista asked if I wanted cream or sugar. It's a simple question and one I answer internally every day, but now that I was drinking coffee in order to review it, I was stumped. After an unusually long period debating with myself, I decided not to take any impurities because I wanted to taste the coffee for what it was. A decision I now regret for two reasons:

1. I usually take cream, sugar, and/or cocoa with my coffee and to suddenly avoid it is to be untrue to my taste buds. Next time I will sully the blackness of my brew.
2. Coffee is hot. Especially when you haven't added the usual cream to cool it down a bit.

So in my eagerness to conduct my review, not only was I untrue to my taste buds, I was also cruel to them by scorching them in hot coffee. I'm still paying the price. Almost a day later my tongue is still fuzzy where the un-creamed coffee enveloped it. Lesson learned.

Despite these setbacks, I was able to regroup and slow down to actually get an impression of the shop from which to do a review.

The outward appearance of the Cafe is as I described earlier; it looked like someone used a shoehorn to get it shoved into its location. An observation that was reinforced when I went inside. Inside was a typical coffee bar setup with a counter to order and a nice bar stool counter facing the window so that you can watch people go by as you sip your HOT coffee. What was not so typical was that to get from the ordering counter to the nearest bar stool (you had your choice of two) you only had to take one step. The Moonstruck Chocolate Cafe is not designed for a person to sit and relax, it's much more of a place to get your caffeine and go about your business.

The coffee ended up holding true to this business model. It wasn't brewed too strongly, though I hesitate to say that it was a weak brew because that would carry a very negative connotation which I don't want to express, it just wasn't very strong. In addition to not being very strong, the coffee also had a very machine-y taste to it. It took me about 10 minutes to finish the small cup, mostly because I had to wait for it to cool down since I didn't add any cream, but when I was done I turned around (did I mention the shop was small) ordered my double shot espresso.

For the espresso I decided to go with the theme of the shop and I took it to go as I walked back to the parking garage. The quality of the espresso was similar to that of the drip brew and I would even go so far as to guess that they used the same beans for both. The machine taste in the espresso was much stronger than in the drip, but on the grand scheme both were on the not-strong end of the scale.

To be fair, the Moonstruck Chocolate Cafe is, as the name suggests, a chocolate shop and uses coffee for additional income so the quality of that coffee and the coffee house experience probably won't have a huge affect on their success. If I'm buying chocolate I'll definitely stop by if I'm in the area, but if I'm looking for coffee I think I'll pass it by next time.

One more word of advice - if you're going to be drinking a lot of coffee shortly before driving through Portland at rush hour, don't. Coffee dehydrates you, but not through sweating.