Kosher Critic: Sickly sweet at Coffee Bean

The arrival of Coffee Bean in New York was accompanied by internet-driven hype, making it seem like it was the greatest kosher thing to happen to New York City. Everywhere you clicked, there were tweets, status updates and blog posts extolling the virtues of this LA-based coffee chain. I absorbed volumes of information about their jalapeño cheddar bagel and was told that their coffee was so good it was the rival to any boutique café with their pompous baristas and handpicked (conflict free) beans.
The problem with all this hype was that no matter how good Coffee Bean truly was, an unreasonable expectation had been set and by the time I finally made it down to West 38th Street and Broadway, I assumed that Juan Valdez himself would hold my coat while I dipped a mastodon ivory cup into the solid gold espresso fountain. Despite being there to meet an old friend to catch up I chose to do my food critic thing and order more than a typical consumer, to get a good idea of the cross section of Coffee Bean’s offerings. I began with an espresso and one of their house donuts.
The house donut immediately intrigued me because of both its size and shape. For starters it was square rather than round. I would eventually find out that the shape served to allow the donut to contain custard in two of its four sides. This I must admit is a brilliant solution to the dilemma that is “how do you keep donut filling from squirting out when you eat it”. The donut itself was huge, I mean comically large and could have easily been a meal unto itself. Upon trying the donut I found it to be not bad. It was soft and doughy with a chocolate glaze and the gooey custard.
The flavor however was slightly off. Not bad but certainly nothing to write home about. It reminded me of a Tastykake actually in that it was sweet and soft and very much a desert but it tasted very fake and loaded with preservatives. The espresso was also not bad but by no means was it fantastic. I would never argue that Coffee Bean doesn’t make good coffee because what they gave me was far better than I have ever had at a Starbucks but it was not the mind blowing caffeine fueled experience I expected it to be.
From there I had a pepper jack and Portobello sandwich and Coffee Beans version of a Tazo Tea. The tea that I believed they called a “mucho mango” or some similar name containing mildly witty alliteration was made by adding tea and mango flavoring to ice and then blending until it had a slurpee constancy. It was sickly sweet and artificial tasting just like the donut. The mango flavoring had clearly come from some industrial bottle and did nothing to further the flavor of the tea. The sandwich however was really good. The bread was fresh and had a good amount of spicy pepper jack cheese melted to one side. It was stuffed with grilled portabella mushrooms and red peppers. The other side of the bread had a very mild pesto spread over it. All together these components made for an excellent sandwich with the mild sweetness of the peppers playing well with the earthy mushroom and the zesty cheese. It was the kind of sandwich I would love to have more often for lunch. That being said I can’t say that it was a better (or cheaper) sandwich then you can get at Circa or Milk Street Café which means that of everything I tried though everything was adequate and even reached into the realm of really good there was nothing that made Coffee Bean stand out. Ah well I guess that just is a lesson for me. You can’t believe everything you read online.

Zechariah Mehler is a widely published food writer and expert in social marketing. Follow him on Twitter @thekoshercritic