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This modern glass storefront, built in 2008 on the site of 70-year-old Brooks Camera, offers a modern, culturally diverse dessert café. The long internal space is characterized by a long bench on one side with simple-but-modern tables and modern, colorful acrylic chairs. They offer frozen yogurt, crêpes, and Vietnamese sandwiches - and a coffee bar featuring Four Barrel Coffee - with their new elephant-logo branding printed out on photocopies throughout the store (and out front on the sidewalk sign). But as progressive as this location tries to be, its espresso is a bit regressive. We were originally told by the staff that they used Four Barrel for both filter and espresso coffee, but that has since been corrected by the management to be Peter James Coffee. They have a two-group La Spaziale, but they favor a single-group, superautomatic Schaerer Ambiente machine to produce shots of espresso with a thin, pale crema with extremely large and erratic bubbles. It looks a mess. Fortunately it tastes a little better than it looks, but not by much: a mellow flavor of spices with enough body to the large shots to prevent it from being mistaken for filter coffee. [CLOSED: Urban Picnic as of 2010.]
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