Verve Coffee Roasters — Restaurant in Tokyo

The cafe is on the side of the JR train station, and part of the newoman shopping centre, next to dean and deluca. I visited on a weekday morning, the shop space was flat shaped and smaller than I imagined and quite packed. The cappuccino was creamy, so if you just count the ambience and the coffee it’s worth 4 to 5 stars.

My three star rating was given due to the confusion caused by the poor shop design (for newcomers):

(1) two stools were set in front of the cashier, which led to a misunderstanding that its a bar table, and you would hesitate to walk over to make your order because those two customers would be sitting just inches away from your elbow;

(2) it is sort of a semi self service cafe. after drinking in the house, the staff would ask you to place ceramic cups on the side bar/cabinet , which actually do not have much space to put anything — I think three cups is the most it can take without piling up or tumbling anything on The floor.

(3) the stools set on both sides of the entrance is set along two L shaped tables, once the seats closer to the door are taken, the corner seat becomes hard to access, if you’re a regular sized adult, you have to bump off the customer next to you to squeeze in. So what happens is that those seats are quite often left empty while ppl just stand in the middle of the shop, trying to find a less obstructive spot to finish their coffee.

(4) the confusion of 1-3 caused some one male staff to be a bit grouchy and long faced cause he had to constantly remind clueless newcomers like me as to what to do and how to act according to their shop etiquette. I have to add though, that they are very friendly towards regular customers.

The problem is mainly caused by taking in too many seats in such a small place. So ... I would suggest moving to a bigger space or redesigning the shop front to live up to the name it made in The states. Turning it into a takeaway only shop...

Wonderful on a good day. Leaves a bad taste in your mouth on others with occasional service glitches.

Today, I tried to order their discounted "one more coffee" but was told no I have to have finished my first cup.

Of course! That's what I'd expect anyway. Except I specifically asked their staff twice previously, how this works in my past visits ("so do I just come back with receipts?"), and each time the staff opted to give me the second cup together with the first. I returned more times directly asking for the second cup from the start, without issues.

Now though, I have a mustached staff here telling me in a cold and condescending tone that they were just being nice, and rules are rules, as if I'm taking advantage of them. Excuse me? Your rules are unpublished and self-contradicts. Train your staff, not your customers.

It just so happens they run out of nitro gas after the first cup (which is wonderful) and when they replaced the canister for the second cup, it still came out under gassed and bad. So there's that.

I'm being overly sensitive, but I don't really care when the clerks cannot put on a smile and there's an abundance of alternative. Maybe he just had a bad day and is getting...

10th cuppa (it's been a while)

I've always wanted to try Verve Coffee since it does have a reputation for roasting pretty damn good covfefe. All the notes on that card were noticable. If I were to nitpick, I asked if they had a flat white, they said yes. They asked me how big I wanted it, I told them as big as a cappuccino. They called my name and said that it was a flat white, but in fact it was a cappuccino. Can't blame them tbh since it's quite difficult to make that super thin layer of foam in a flat white. Also, the micro foam wasn't so micro, but again, can't blame them for it. It's really hard to get right. I couldn't even get it right. Another nitpick thing about it is the choice of beans for their milk base drink. The blueberry tart really comes out, but the citric and sweetness of it didn't balance so well with the milk. A citric tart is usually balanced with a "salty" crust. It's a great cup of covfefe, but it wasn't as balanced as I hoped it was. A redeeming quality of it was the texture and temperature of the milk....