Orange Cat Cafe

The lattes are on point and there are gluten free options! I’m sure I’ll spend plenty of time here over the next two years of my education.

This is a magical little gem in Farmington! Gluten free options galore!

TLDR Version: Food: 10/10 Great flavor, appropriate portions & cost. Drink: 10/10 Great coffees, better prices. Many items are cheaper than fast food contemporaries, with more variability and infinitely superior quality. Service: 9/10 It’s not the kind of service you’d expect at “The French Laundry”, but for a small & privately-owned cafe the service is nearly best-in-class. Small businesses cannot afford to overstaff all the time and staffing has been appropriate on each of my visits. Atmosphere: 9/10 While you will not find live-cats roaming the establishment (sad), true to its name, the Orange Cat Cafe` gives our feline overlords the respect they deserve. Full review: Leaving this review after my third visit (never judge a cafe/restaurant/bar on the first visit); as someone who travels over 200 days a year across nearly every state in the country, I can pretty safely say the food and drink quality are among (if not the) best cafe`s in the nation. While taste preferences are subjective, in my opinion the menu coffees and latte`s perfectly balance flavors so that they are not too bitter or too sweet. The iced coffees we had also used iced-coffee-cubes, so after 20 minutes your beverage isn’t a watered down sludge. Notably, their coffee is also very, very potent. Their breakfast burrito in particular is utterly fantastic and I have yet to try a menu option that was anything less than “very good”. The only negative is they stop serving breakfast after 11, which is completely understandable. However, with breakfast options this good, this fact is nonetheless a hard pill to swallow. While breakfast ending is a catastrophe worthy of Greek epics, their lunch fare holds it’s own. Something I have to address: One of the negative reviews commented on the value, to which I would retort; you can no longer get a decent breakfast+coffee at a fast food restaurant for less than ~$13-17 and the quality here will vehemently surpass any fast food fare at a similar cost. You will not find a better quality at a comparable price point. As that is the second time I’ve mentioned the comparison to fast-food establishments, it’s also worth noting that the similarity begins and ends at the price-point. This cafe is significantly elevated above the abhorrent standards you’d find at a chain establishment, while keeping prices reasonably comparable. You have choices; you can get a highly-processed breakfast sandwich for ~$6 that came out of a plastic bag and was quickly microwaved at some name-brand chain places, or you can get a scratch-made breakfast burrito at the orange cat for ~$7.50 and if you don’t feel like breakfast they have an excellent array of various lunch fares; why would you ever choose the former? The portion sizes do, however, vary wildly. This is almost certainly to keep some of their more adventurous items at a reasonable cost; their daily special “LGBT!” (Lettuce, Goatcheese, Bacon, Tomato, focaccia bread, aioli) was one of their pricier items at $11.00, while also being one of the smaller portion sizes, for instance. However, you’d be hard-pressed to construct a similar sandwich yourself without spending more on the ingredients than what they’re charging. As such, to make the sandwich as large as one of their regular menu staples would force them to charge $15-17 just to break even. TLDR: $11 was the sweet spot. Overall I see the size variability as a boon since you do not always want to stuff your face to the point of feeling ill and all the portions are appropriately satisfying. Ultimately, I’m 6’3”/270lbs and I don’t leave hungry for $15-$20, including coffee. Considering a small privately owned shop doesn’t have the negotiating power of a chain-establishment for lowering food costs, the pricing is somewhere between “fair” and “criminally low”, especially given the aforementioned quality. There’s also vegetarian/gluten free options, if you’re into those sorts of things.