La Forêt: Industrial cafe in Burnaby
La Forêt is a trendy cafe located in Burnaby. The space used to be a giant garage of some sort, but they have transformed it into an aesthetically pleasing cafe, with giant (fake) plants and open seating. They offer brunch plates, coffee and tea, as well as cakes and pastries.
Related: Read my past review on their brunch plates here.
I took my cousin and aunt here for some tea time while they were visiting for the holidays. Here is everything we ordered!
Interior
I’ve mentioned this in my previous post, but the interior of La Foret is really cool. The space has really high ceilings and concrete floors and walls, giving it an industrial look. They have a lot of greenery inside (albeit fake) and a lot of open seating. For the holidays, they also decorated it with Christmas trees so it felt quite festive.
The process when you come in is you order at the counter, kind of like cafeteria style. They have signs that ask you to not sit down at a table until you get your order, but it’s almost always busy so I can see people tempted to snag a spot while your other parties line up and order food. We followed the signs and after we ordered, there was actually a worked that told us he reserved a table for us as we are a “family” table of 4. Some of their tables are reserved for larger groups so we thought that was really nice because I was actually worried there would be no spots after we order, and we’d be walking around with our trays of food and drinks and I would inevitably trip and drop everything.
Drinks
We all ordered 1 drink each: iced spanish latte ($6), matcha tea latte (ice and hot – $6 each), and a cappuccino ($5).
We all got the 16 oz (except for the cappuccino), but I didn’t realize just how large that is! Huge cup of hot matcha latte for me and it was quite sweet. I enjoyed it, but I am no expert in matcha so I can’t tell you if they use real or premium matcha powder or not. I will say that the hot matcha latte tasted better than the iced one. The iced one had less flavour (less sweetness and less matcha).
Pastries & cakes
We ordered everything to share between 4 adults.
Strawberries & cream croissant ($8)
I LOVE croissants. You bet I got this the minute I saw it. The croissant is actually huge – I don’t think the photo shows you a good enough scale – but also this croissant is like $8 ($7.50 but I always round up my prices for you all) so it better be huge lol.
Croissant was yummy – nice and flaky. Loved the strawberries and cream.
Matcha cream cake ($8)
We order 1 slice of the matcha cream cake (you can order a whole cake). The cake is pretty decent – sponge is fluffy and the cream is “not too sweet”. It has a more subtle matcha flavour, I think because mostly the matcha is baked into the sponge and there’s a thin layer of matcha cream, but other than that they use regular cream for everything else.
Strawberry fruit tart ($8)
I love fruit tarts and strawberry tarts are probably my favourite because they look so cute (like in animes). Usually the fruit tarts I like contain some kind of custard, but this one only has cream and strawberries. The tart is mostly just the bottom layer, which had a nice texture, but overall this is quite a simple strawberry tart with not a lot of strawberries. It is kinda similar to the croissant actually, only the base is different (croissant vs. tart). Overall, I liked it and thought it looked cute but not worth $8 if I compare to the croissant.
Matcha waffle ($18)
As you can probably tell, my family loves matcha lol. We also order the matcha waffle to share, which comes with kiwis, strawberries, matcha ice cream, whipped cream, walnuts and a green tea sauce. The waffle is actually quite big as well but pretty good size to share with 4 people (might be too big for 2 people unless that’s all you ordered).
For a dessert that looks so sweet, it actually wasn’t. And by now you probably know the best compliment an Asian auntie can give to a dessert is “oh, it’s not too sweet”. She also liked the quality of the waffle, which was fluffy and made a good base.
Final thoughts
Loewe’s rating: ⭐⭐⭐
In total, we spent around $84 for 4 adults. This includes our 4 drinks and 4 pastries, as well as a loaf of squid ink bread ($6) and 2 almond tuiles ($6 each) we bought to bring home. This is a little pricey for a cafe but we also got a lot of goodies (4 pastries and we were really full, couldn’t even finish the croissant). All of their pastries and desserts look really cute or pretty and they have unique items as well, like the squid ink bread my aunt bought (the whole loaf of bread is black in colour). So there are some fun items.
Also, the aesthetics of the space make it worth it in my opinion, because for cafes I think a lot of people want to just sit and enjoy the space with their coffee or tea. So for $5-6 a drink, I think it’s not that bad for such a pretty cafe.
Sincerely, Loewe