The last time we wrote about this cafe, two sisters were betting everything (the money and time) on it and had no idea whether anyone would come.
I went in on a weekday afternoon and couldn’t even find a seat.
That is the update.
Unscripted Coffee soft opened July 31 on Granville Street, in the old BrainStation unit steps from Waterfront Station.
Behind it are Angel Dee, 17, a fresh high school graduate, and her sister Sara Dee, 23, who finished an Accounting and Real Estate degree at UBC last spring.
Neither had run a food business before, and the entire point of the name was that they weren’t going to pretend otherwise.
Twelve days in, the room is doing the arguing for them.
And ever since the cafe opened, one of our friends has been constantly sharing how good the sweet corn matcha latte and the kimchi bacon danish are.
I got the sweet corn matcha latte and not the danish, so only one of those gets a verdict out of me.
The sweet corn is not a garnish or a background note.
It is the base, sweet and starchy with the matcha, and it drinks closer to a corn dessert than to coffee.
If sweet corn is your thing or you’re feeling experimental, you may like this a lot.
If you came in wanting something tart or fruit-forward, opt for the strawberry matcha.
The neat thing here is that the drinks are grouped by how tired you are.
Running from super tired down through needs to slow down and needs to chill out, ending at is feeling crazy.
Pallet Coffee Roasters supplies the mainstay espresso, a natural single-origin from Brazil called Serra Negra, with Alai Coffee’s Indian-origin beans as the first feature on a rotating roaster program.
The pastries are outsourced and labelled honestly. Sourdough from Freya, including that danish.
Vegan loaves from To Live For.
All four To Live For loaves were sold out by mid-afternoon on a weekday. That tells you more than any opening-week photo.
The seating is deliberately unserious. Bean bags in one corner, stools, benches, and communal tables with strangers working elbow to elbow.
The thing I didn’t expect is the whiteboard.
It has a running list of drink suggestions with tally marks next to them. Customers voting on what the menu does next.
That is the whole thesis made physical, and it is my favourite thing in the room.
A cafe that has decided, in public, that it does not know everything yet.
Two sisters, one of them still a teenager, took the most expensive corner in the city and filled it on a Tuesday afternoon.
Unscripted Coffee joins a run of recently opened Vancouver spots like Mello on Robson, G3 Kitchen and Bar, and Viethaus.
For more new and upcoming food spots in Metro Vancouver, take a peek at our tracker here, and subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.
Address: 455 Granville Street, Vancouver, BC