The Antique Row Cafe sign + Drinks from Hawthorn & Better Buzz

It's nice when you can count on your neighbor as a good friend and as one willing to try new places...

Well, new to her but not to me, but still, an adventure...

Earlier, we had gone over to 85C in National City to enjoy a few savory pastries (those involving hot dogs and/or cheese).  Coffee would be here in Normal Heights (or the outermost edge of North Park), at Hawthorn.

I noticed that the signage for Antique Row Cafe looked like this as of June 2017.

Here it is from October 2016:


The signage  was stripped as of January 2017 (it rained this day, during KD's birthday food crawl):

Later that month...stucco covered or replaced the former wooded exterior.  The sign was back but not the "title" of the restaurant.

I guess they wanted a refresh on their look, but I think that the new signgage is on the plain side.

Over at Hawthorn, they also changed up their meny board. It was no longer handwritten. They also put their new drinks ont here.

My "Berry Manilow" and MN's dark mocha.





The "Berry Manilow" was espresso with coconut milk and housemade blueberry syrup. Very light and refreshing. MN thought her mocha was too bitter and ended up adding sugar to it.  Out of all of the mochas we've tried, Hawthorn's version using dark chocolate is Bert's favorite.

More recently, TC and I used the remainder of my Starbucks giftcard to get these two drinks. The promotion (featuring Lady Gaga and the Cups of Kindness promotion) ends on 6/19. My drink was the Pink Ombre while hers was the Strawberry Acai refresher.




Both drinks were very refreshing and lovely to look at. Coconut milk seems to be quite the popular ingredient nowadays. It doesn't add as many calories as milk and there is no lactose as well.  Plus, coconut milk makes a great mixer for these drinks. The pink ombre drink consists of fruit lime refreshers with aforementioned coconut milk and a splash of Teavana's shaken iced passion tango tea.  Her drink had strawberry refresher (with white grape juice), with passionfruit and acai flavors as well as green coffee extract. Sliced strawberries (they seemed formerly frozen but I could be wrong) were floated on top of the drink.

A few weeks ago, we  (plus the Prof, her husband and D) all went to the Better Buzz in Point Loma after having attended a graduation party...


These drinks aren't really "summery" but they are favorites, my iced mint mojito and TC's iced chai latte (this place makes her favorite version).



Read about my attempt at making the "Berry Manilow" here...

Previous visit to Hawthorn:
March 2017

I missed out on the other drink, like the violet drink but there's blog posts I've seen where you can make your  own. It uses coconut milk, surprise!  Pretty easy enough. Save yourself $4 and some chump change while you're at it.  There are more summer drinks at other local coffee shops that I still want to try...Hopefully I will be able to do those visits before I head back to work.