Lily's Chocolate & Coffee — Restaurant in Alexandria

This cute little cafe is the best place to fulfill your sweet tooth and/or hang out!

When you walk in, you immediately feel the “instagram” vibes! The color theme is pink and embraces all the feminine energy! It is a corner shop with lots of great windows and lighting, cafe style seats and some high top seating by the window- a great place to meet a friend, have a date, or just read/work solo!

At the counter I was warmly welcomed by a woman whom I believe might be the owner! I told her it was my first time trying lockmas and that I was unfamiliar with what they were. She kindly walked me through all the options and described these delicious desserts that I can’t believe I never knew about before !

The specialty food item here are the lockmas. They are a middle eastern fried dough ball (the owners are Iraqi, and come traditionally soaked in syrup/honey and sprinkled with pistachios or cinnamon on top.) At Lily’s they expanded the toppings significantly and you can cover it with the traditional items, or get dark chocolate, milk chocolate, biscoff syrup, date syrup and much more! I decided on the chocolate lockmas which have a chocolate center (NOT creme filled which made me so happy) and crushed pistachio on top. THEY WERE SO DELICIOUS. I’ve already told all my friends about this, and plan to return asap!! I love love dessert, not actually normally a big donut fan, but these are very different than American donuts and are really a great sweet treat!

It is located right on King st in Alexandria (which is the Main Street in old town Alexandria lined with cute shops, antiques, bars and restaurants- for any out -of- towners) and truly a great local business to support amongst a lot of other great options on this treat. Trust me when I say -...

As a PhD candidate & entrepreneur, the majority of my work is online, so I’m able to explore different spaces to work from home. That being said, I was hoping to find a new cafe to work remotely from, because I saw good reviews online, but my experience was anything but good. I respect the employees for simply doing their jobs, but they communicated that non-paying customers aren’t able to access the wifi NOR are they able to stay in the cafe unless they’re swiping their card. I was politely asked to leave by the team leader because I “needed to make seating available for paying customers.”

Those who are simply coming for ambiance & a quick bite, continue to come. However, for those who work from home for long hours in one space from a cafe, STEER CLEAR. You’re only as valuable as deep as your pockets go, which is extremely classist & exclusionary. Anyone who does remote work outside their home understands the value of a chance in scenery & how expensive it can be if you’re eating out for every meal while working. I’ve never seen a coffee shop so classist and money hungry to kick someone out because they didn’t want to pay for an overpriced beverage or pastry. Even Starbucks is better than that. Losing out on a key demographic of potential recurring customers with this type of service. For those looking for a better cafe to work at, check out Cameron Cafe right beside Ben Brenman Park in Alexandria. Extremely disappointed and will not be returning nor recommending this...

Went here on a Saturday afternoon and it was a disappointing experience to say the least. I went in for the Dubai pistachio chocolate and stayed to observe for a while.

There were four people working, but somehow only one gentleman ended up having to take orders, make all the drinks, while telling the other workers what to do at the same time... People had to wait a while for their drinks/pastries. At one point, the line started to pile out the door but no one was taking their orders. The entry way is extremely inconvenience since that's where the line to order is, you are going to be push around a lot as people will keep having to enter and exit the cafe.

The gentleman informed me that you have to pre-order the pistachio chocolate bar, which I was surprised by but I totally understand and just ordered a pistachio latte instead. There were another gentleman making the chocolate bar. I saw that some of the chocolate bars did not turn out well, a few were broken pretty badly. However, they still packaged them to give out to customers. This was very sad to see, but made me glad that I didn't end up buying one.

The gentleman who was taking my order was pretty apologetic and did apologize to another customer for having to stop taking orders since the drinks orders were piling up behind him and it seemed like no one knew how to make drinks except for him... Their pistachio latte was decent but not enough for me to want to go back and deal...