Barbarossa Coffee - Spring

I can not even say enough about this awesome cafe. I went earlier in the week and had me that lavender latte omg. Best drink I have had in a LONG time. I mean the flavors just moved my spirit. When I tell you that the coffee tasted great , I can’t even explain how good the house coffee is. I could taste the passion that went into my cup. So I went back, of course. And the milk and honey latte. Nombre kiss kiss Barbarossa is it for me. Thank you so much and I will see you soon.

I absolutely loved the ambiance, and the blueberry cheesecake and piña colada smoothie were delicious!

The coffee is excellent, but I’m not convinced that the breakfast croissant is worth $9.50. That was a letdown.

Finally a coffee-focused place in the northern suburbs!!! Coffee aficionados- go here!!! They will do v60, aero press, Chemex, French press and other methods- whatever method your coffee-loving-heart desires! You can choose from a great selection of their house roasted beans. I wish they had more light roasts, but the one light roast, Ethiopian Sidamo was delicious. Great place! Oh, and they also had an amazing dessert selection. I couldn’t resist the opera cake.

It pains me to leave a less than stellar review because on the whole I really like this place. I've never had a bad drink, and the employees are all nice. If you're JUST getting a drink, it's hard to find better anywhere else. I'm going to keep coming here. However, their pastries are really, really gross. So gross I feel the need to warn people. I can't speak to the case right next to the cash register that has stuff like croissants. Maybe those are fine; I've never gotten one. I'm talking about the case to the right of that case, near the pick up counter. The one that has more complex pastries like cakes, cheesecakes, etc. Every time I've gotten something out of there it's been inedible. I'll eat a pastry that's merely underwhelming, I just won't be happy about it. But these are so terribly nasty I genuinely cannot eat them. Part of the problem is they taste ANCIENT. Like they've been there over a week or something. The textures are awful, visible condensate on them, etc. But the other problem is the recipes are wack. I got an eclair today and the filling was like buttercream frosting mixed with gelatinized flour or maybe some kind of weird fiber who knows. All I can say it was the grainiest, grossest thing ever. Eclair filling shouldn't *crumble* no matter how cold or old it is. What in the world! The worst thing was I paid $7. It was twice the size of a typical eclair so $5 or $6 would have been okay if it was actually edible. But $7 for an ancient eclair with no filling I could recognize, just to take one bite and wish I hadn't... that's crazy. Another time in recent memory I got this layered cake that tasted sort of like graham cracker. It wasn't as bad as the eclair but it was really dry, which is weird given how wet some of the stuff in that case is. Anyway, long story short, stick to the drinks, the pastry case was cursed by a sorcerer or something.