Discovering new coffee and tea stops in Vancouver

During the winter months, Jean-Louis takes the bus to work instead of his bike. As an added bonus to owning a monthly bus pass, every Sunday we can use it as a family pass. Since the weekend is zoneless and you can use any zone pass to travel anywhere, we sometimes head downtown just for the skytrain ride and walk around. It only takes 23 minutes to get down there on the skytrain and Tristan loves riding it.

A few weeks ago, we skytrained downtown and tried Bonchaz. We love trying new coffee shops, especially when they are in trendy neighborhoods. Bonchaz is a bakery cafe that serves bread and caters for lunches. They have menu items for vegans and vegetarians and serve organic coffee. The prices are very good as well. Their bonchaz look like danishes but are very similar in taste to brioches. We ordered a vegan sandwich, mushroom soup, and coffees when we visited and were quite pleased. I also grabbed a bag of ciabatta bread to make paninis at home. If I were working downtown, this would be the kind of place I would love to have lunch at. 

 

This past weekend, we tried a tea house tucked away in gastown called Après-midi Premium Teahouse. The place was a lot fancier than I had imagined but I loved the atmosphere of it. It had nice seating areas on the ground floor where you could look out of big windows. The place and location had a very European feel to it. They had cool stools made out of logs and interesting painting on the wall. The eating area was quite separate from the counter and tea purchasing area, which was quite nice. The staff were extremely helpful and friendly. I spent a long time just sniffing all their lovely teas in their tea tower. After being rushed many times by Tristan, I ended up buying 50 grams of a white tea called "One Night in Paris" and 50 grams of a black tea called "Candied Almond" based on their smells alone. To drink, I ordered masala chai tea latte with almond milk and a lavender eary grey latte, all sweetened with agave syrup. They were both very good, especially the chai latte. We also had a pain au chocolate and that tasted great also:) I was not disappointed at all about this place!

Jean-Louis and I love going for coffee and tea. We are fond of Starbucks but are very open to try other places as well. Discovering great coffee and tea shops makes me happy:) The best part is that we got to try all these places out because of group coupon sites such as Groupon and Living Social. We would have never known about them otherwise.