Cafe hopping cont: Phinista Cafe

PROMYS means I'm in Boston means I can continue cafe hopping :)

Phinista Cafe

Rating: 3.5/5
Location: 96 Peterborough St, Boston, MA 02215
Ordered: Iced Phin Ube (6), Matcha Bun (4.5), Saigon Breakfast Banh Mi (11)

Vibes: A cute little coffeeshop just a little distance away from Fenway. Dark wood furniture against a white backdrop. Lots of real flowers and plants everywhere. It's the kind of decoration at a Vietnamese coffee shop, I suppose. No music playing, tons of chatter, good crowd but you can definitely find seats. For some reason, their countertop is way too tall. I'm sitting at a high chair and the counter is at the base of my neck if I slouch a little. I'm typing this with my laptop on my lap underneath the counter.

Banh Mi: Two fried eggs, carrots, cucumber, pickled onions, slices of some pepper that I promptly removed, cilantro, and some savory, slightly spicy sauce on a banh mi. I love banh mis, they're so crunchy and also their filling is usually very "light". They also scratch up the roof of my mouth, though. This one is great: crispy on the outside, hard and chewy on the inside. There's a great mixture of flavors: the sweet and sour of pickled onion and carrot, the cilantro being cilantro, the umami (is that the right word?) of the egg yolk, and the sauce that I can't really describe bringing spice and another level of flavor to it that I can't place. Man, I should get banh mis more.

Phin Ube: It's Vietnamese iced coffee with purple ube. It's really pretty and instagrammable. Many of their drinks are Instagrammable, and I don't think I picked the prettiest of them. It's okay though, because I went to sleep at 3:30 last night. Anyways, I'm not very familiar with Vietnamese coffee. I've been to Cicada before once and that's about it. This coffee (and in my experience Vietnamese coffee in general) tastes very earthy. It's not very bitter, and leaves an earthy-bittery aftertaste in the mouth. It's not as aromatic as western coffee. There's condensed milk in it, but I'm not getting a particularly strong milk flavor. The upshot is that it doesn't feel "heavy" like some lattes do. Unfortunately, the ube doesn't really blend into the coffee, so I'm just getting chunks of sweet ube occassionally with each sip. Even after a little bit of mixing, it's a slightly odd sensation of getting mini bits of sweet in your coffee.

Matcha Bun: It doesn't look the prettiest, just like a bread bun with green matcha dough topping it. The inside is completely green though. It doesn't taste very strongly of matcha. Actually, I don't really taste any matcha at all. It's slightly sweet, and has almost a croissant-like texture if it wasn't crispy and had layers. Honestly, I really like the texture of the bread. The green bit on the top is actually some sort of sugary icing that is slightly caramelized and adds a sweet little crunch to the bun.

Value: It's normal priced for a coffee shop in Boston. The matcha bun was not really worth it because in the end, it felt like a slightly better piece of bread. The banh mi was pretty reasonably priced for what was in it: a bunch of vegetables and two eggs, and so was the coffee. I definitely won't be getting the phin ube again, but I think their other drinks are worth a try at least. I'm not let down by the quantity, nor am I elated at the price, so it's pretty normal I think.

Rating: The food was pretty good, but probably not the best thing I've ever had, so I hesitate to give it a score higher than 4. Since the phin ube wasn't a good formula, I'm bumping it down half a star. I would bump it down another half for the matcha bun, but the banh mi makes up for it (though I don't know if you can screw up banh mi). It was pretty solid, and maybe if I picked another drink, I would have appreciated this place more, that's why 3 stars seems a bit harsh.