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| - Essence Bakery is the ultimate incarnation of overrated.
This place is great in theory: Tempe has a severe lack of cute cafés, and Essence would seem to fit the bill: outdoor patio, small menu with organic, local fare, a simple, no-frills coffee list á la Cartel. Unfortunately, it falls short when it tries too hard to channel its French roots, which come across not so much "picturesque Parisian bistro" as small portions, high prices and rude waitstaff.
The café is much too small for the traffic it sees, leaving it far more cramped than quaint, and the drinks are consistently subpar. The hot chocolate exists in the realm of "just add water," while the mocha, which promised dark chocolate, will be a disappointment for anyone familiar with the adjectives "rich," "delicious," or "sweet."
The food is good but served in abysmal portions. I recognize that this isn't IHOP, but it IS America, and I expect more than a silver-dollar sized quiche when the pricetag requires that I break a twenty. For $1.25 you can add sausage. The menu doesn't specify, however, that this is a SINGLE sausage, which, when I took a bite, proved no more pleasing than something that could have come from my freezer. Lunch continues in a similar good-but-not-great vein.
What Essence is known for, however, are its croissants and macaroons, which will also cost you an arm and a leg but are, decidedly, much more worth it.
The service is slow and on two of the four occasions I've been here my drink has been forgotten entirely. This morning, I had to request three times to have my mocha brought to me. The hipsters working the cash register are unenthusiastic and unimpressed: I once overheard a customer ask that her quiche be reheated because it was cold, and she was told that "it's policy that we don't reheat our products for constitutional reasons." While that may very well be true, it's customary that when you serve your customer a cold quiche, especially one that just cost them a few gallons of gas, you obligingly serve them another.
I guess in France, c'est la vie.
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