Mountain Sage Coffee — Restaurant in Sonora

I’m a local. After years of coming here, this once great place has had their experienced staff replaced by apathetic “pseudo-baristas” who garner zero interest in making you a cup of coffee in exchange for currency and run the place like their own personal henhouse instead. You'll come in, and watch them as they chitchat with their friends (who’ve already been helped) indefinitely. Or at least for 10 minutes without so much as acknowledging you having come in 10 minutes ago. No, I am not impatient and no I am not exaggerating. I know it’s a small town and thus things go slower, but after 10 minutes of neither the barista nor the patron having a speck of self-awareness or the most BASIC COURTESY to understand there are OTHER PEOPLE WANTING TO GET COFEE so at least step aside or ask us what we want to drink while you continue your conversation. No. We left, annoyed that we even came in. I wasn’t going to wait another 10 minutes, because after years of this I knew where the wind blows.

I’ve had more than a handful of experiences of waiting 20 minutes here before leaving empty handed over the years. Thing is, it’s absolutely not because the place is so busy, because it WASN’T. No coffee was being made, just idle chitchat like we’d walked into someone’s home and were intruding. If you call yourself a coffee shop and have an open sign on the front, how about you serve coffee? No, that’s too much to ask. I’ve hyped this place up to friends and family only for them to have similar dissuading experiences: waiting a long time, not being served, or the coffee not being very good.

So after about 6 years coming here, as a local but never accepting their local discount, as someone who had consistently tipped more than the price of the coffee every time I came here to support a small local business, I am DONE with this place. It’s gone from a place I came to for comfort to a place I’ve easily wasted several hours waiting to be served and never being served over the past couple of years. Joke’s on me for wishing it would improve.

There used to be baristas here that made a great cup of coffee without making you feel like you walked into their bedroom unannounced. I’m never coming back here again. May the previous people, the people who cared and were competent and not lazy and rude, come back. As is, AVOID AVOID AVOID AVOID. You’re better off drinking literally any form of coffee than wishing upon a star in the would-be...

Pistachio ice cream, raspberry gelato....superb!....The easily overlooked detail in the garden is, for the eagle-eyed, a dive down for eccentricity nourishment....like searching for Waldo, can you find the tadpoles, the pictures within the pictures?...Service, meditative hip, friendly dogs may greet you, tips 'are sexy' reads the label on the register jar. A 'Must Stop' on the way to, and on the way back from Yosemite V,.Tuolumne, Hetch Hetchy....I mean how else do you absorb star encapsulated granite skyscrapers, cathedral meadows, and invigorating flowing waters than by reflecting on and synthesizing the physical and metaphysical in a open air chair?.....well, try ordering gelato, coffee, your menu muse, and digesting the external, internal and eternal in a garden of creativity, unpredictability, humor, and beauty....You can also sit inside and watch the show.

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It’s our first time here and we loved the atmosphere. We ordered a lavender and lemon zest coffee, expecting it to be an iced latte. However, it arrived as a hot. We requested a cup of ice to make it cold, but one of the baristas was rude and made it seem like we were causing her trouble.

When we ordered the coffee, the barista should have asked if we wanted it iced or hot. We only discovered later that a 12oz order is not iced, while a 16oz order is. Obviously, we would have ordered the 16oz if we had been informed while we were ordering it.

Overall, the place is great, but the service definitely needs...