Metro Taipei × Louisa Coffee — Restaurant in Da'an District

Contemplating hard whether I should write this review or not. It’s Louisa Coffee, there’s not much to say and it’s not as if anyone’s going to give it a thorough reading though getting it out will lessen one of my many pains of regret of not having done or said that instead. On April 1st I had ordered a flat white along with a jalapeno panini of some sort. This female cashier with a short bob and glasses seemed to be very fixated on getting an exact loud yes or no response from the customers so I’ve noticed from her interaction with the previous customer. I understand she was doing her job but it was slowly starting to wear off my patience as she explained to me starting from this day forward we are adding extra charges to takeout cups and we hope you are okay with it. “Are you or are you not okay with the extra charge?” After I said I wanted to grab and go and there were also no seats available inside anyway.

I nodded and said, “Yes, that’s fine.” I mean… can I not not be okay with it, I had thought? It sounded as if she was giving me an option to deny surcharges.

“Extra bucks for the to-go cups, do you want it here or to go?”, she impatiently asked yet once again and then demanded I carefully read their new terms of regulations regarding the store’s environmentally friendly policies.

After a few really unsuccessful exchanges, we both took a deep breath and… by the time my order was done, which took about 20mins for the panini to cook, my flat white was missing in action!She did not even punch in my order.🤷🏿‍♀️🤷🏿‍♀️ May I ask, why all that hassle in the first place? But, thank you to the other staff that later handed me my order. She waved her wand and my MIA flat white...

I’ve had much better experiences in all the other Louisa’s I’ve been to. The workers were quite unhelpful. When I asked for sugar and creamer, they told me to get it where the trash area was, but there was none there. They then refilled it but I clearly had an iced coffee and they didn’t offer me the liquid sugar which most places usually do, even 711. Then my cup lid was leaking even when closed securely so coffee got on my pants and when I asked for a cup with a secure lid, one worker was a bit rude about it and said just switch it to the other worker and she said back in Chinese that all the cups were like that. And I said all the plastic cups leak?? That’s not normal. And she said it’s normal. Finally she just switched it to a paper cup, but I’m just disappointed in their service. I watched an angry and rude Taiwanese lady yelling at them and the same woman was very polite to her. Maybe that put her in a bad mood to be rude to me. Bottom line is the cups...

Wishy-washy pourover with pungent biting aftertaste. If not because of their Kenyan coffee beans not being graded AA, it's the barista that ruined the cup. My guess is that the coffee was poured through overheated water which extracted much unpleasant tastes out of the coarse grind. It smelled bland, then the biting scratched all over my tongue after every single sip. I've been trying Louisa's at scattered spots all over Taipei, but this place is the least recommended. Limited seats indoors, tissue and plastic straws rolling on the floor, and the worst of all, lots of people taking over tables for the whole afternoon. Awful lot and always fully taken. On top of that, the mouthy barista responsible for milk coffee or Italian coffee if you like, is claiming all their cups out of SOP but still the coffee tastes like burnt bread. Quality control and retrianing needs...