La Boulangerie

One of the highest hurdles in a business is the ability to adapt with current trends and industry developments. It’s kind of like a car traveling uphill, a business either moves forward or slides back; there is no stalling out, you must try and keep your business moving forward.

In coffee as well as any business, moving forward usually translates into staying on top of rising trends, and keeping your business looking fresh. This place looks tired and old.

Sadly, La Boulangerie is not skilled in this; many times a coffee establishment will find success with an initial plan and as long as it works (aka makes money), the business remains in a holding pattern until things head south and by then it’s usually too late. Here’s what’s crazy, I have driven past this place a number of times and seen the patio plugged with people and maybe it’s just because they have a great location on 4 Street SW, I am not sure. With the amount of traffic this place sees, it should be amazing, it was not.

 

The Interior

Once you walk inside, the café looks tired and old. Seating is extremely limited and is very tight. We grabbed a table close to the windows but since the till was mere feet away from us, people were always just about on top of us. There was a guy sitting at the table that was right in front of the till and he could hardly wait for us to leave so he could move a bit farther away so he would stop getting bumped into.

The Drinks

The drinks were ordered were as follows:

My wife ordered the Bernard Callebaut Hot Chocolate and my daughter and myself ordered Vanilla Lattes. The Vanilla Lattes were lacking flavor. La Boulangerie serves illy coffee. Honestly the latte tasted like it came out of one of those automatic machines you see at Tim Horton’s.

One positive is my wife’s hot chocolate was actually really good and had lots of flavor. It tasted like it was liquid milk chocolate. Great job on this drink.

The Food

Unfortunately today we didn’t order any food. A lot of what we seen looked really good and the quality looked like it was there but it was very pricey. We did want to try a macaron so my daughter bought the Orange Blossom and White Chocolate and the sad thing is we didn’t taste any orange until my daughter decided to dissect and find where the orange was. For paying the most for a macaron ($2.50) we have ever paid for, we expected stronger flavour.

The Service

The service we received was pretty good, the owner was the bubbliest one there that day. The rest of the staff only talked to you if you asked them a question.

 

Overall

Unfortunately, on this day I really feel La Boulangerie failed for me. Maybe it was a bad day for this place, but I don’t think so.

 

Parking and Location

They have a lot that you can sometimes find parking, if you cannot get a space there, it is street parking which can sometimes be very hard to find on a weekend.