Review: The Sweet Life Cafe

The Sweet Life Cafe is located in the historic district of the City of Fairfax. It fronts on Chainbridge Road just across the sreet from the newly completed Old Town Village town center. In contrast to the new ''chain" restaurants filling Old Town Village, The Sweet Life Cafe is in the historic Moore House (circa 1840) and the exterior appearance is of a chic little cafe surrounded by a wrap-around porch and quaint garden. However, as you walk in you encounter more of a country creamery with an ice cream and coffee counter. From this main part of the restaurant you can order scoops of handmade ice cream or gelato, shakes, sundaes, coffee, expresso, sodas and a variety of traditional and herbal teas. The large wrap-around porch provides abundant outside seating that is perfect for enjoying an ice cream cone, sundae or selected beverages with your family or friends. In a side wing, there is also a small dining area inside that offers informal table service with mainly deli-style food.


To start, you should know that I love, adore and sometimes even dream about great ice cream. I enter a new ice cream shop with adventurous anticipation of finding a new "treasure." The ice cream at The Sweet Life Cafe is handmade by the cafe owners and delivers the extra-creamy richness of handmade ice cream that I expect to only find from a mom-and pop owned creamery out in the country.

If you are looking for new, bold or exotic "flavor of the month" ice cream, I did not find any. The cafe offers many "child flavors" like bubble gum, cotton candy, dreamsicle, etc. I did not try any of the kiddie flavors, but savored, smaked my lips, paused and evaluated a small spoonful of the six additional flavors. The cinammon, carmal and banana each attracted my attention. It was the cinnamon ice cream that first hit my palate, but it had such a slight flavor of cinammon that I could hardly taste it. After I finished my tasting experiment, I was forced to surmize that the ice cream is made by a sweet and talented, but lite-handed, vanilla lover. So I ordered the vanilla. It was scoped into a deep glass ice cream dish with a really long spoon. It was old school delicious.


Before sampling the ice cream, I actually ate lunch in the cafe with Madison and Katie. I must warn you that aside from the main menu, the cafe has totally separate drink and dessert menus. We, unfortuantely, were not provided by our server with the drink menu detailing the available virgin mixed drinks such as a "shirley temple," "charlie brown," "blue lagoon" or cherry coke or the variety of available iced herbal teas. We simply ordered diet cokes. We were also not provided the dessert menu with the molten chocolate cake, apple-cinammon pie and carrot cake with cream-cheese frosting. I noticed both these menus on the coffee counter as we were leaving. So be sure to ask if these menus are not provided. I would have preferred an iced Raspberry Zinger tea with my lunch. Oh, well.
I ordered a sandwich descibed as baked turkey and gouda on a pretzel roll. I have had two types of pretzel rolls: a long, firm baguette-shaped roll and a round roll that is actually braided like a pretzel. Both types are firm like a pretzel and baked golden brown with coarse salt sprinkled on top. My sandwich came on a kaiser roll. I admit that the baked turkey was nice sliced breast meat and the gouda had a rich flavor, but for me the kaiser roll deligated it to a decent deli sandwich, instead of a hip cafe sandwich. The sandwich was accompanied with boring ruffled potato chips and a red cabbage cole slaw. While I was not thrilled with the sandwich platter, I was very happy with the price of my lunch -- $7.25 for friendly table service and a decent deli sandwich with potato chips. It is certainly a place where I can take my whole family to eat without breaking the bank.


MADISON: Hi guys, it's great to be here today. My dad has asked me to say what I thought of my experience at the cafe. I ordered a coffe ice-cream flavored shake that was really good and very creamy. The hamburger that I ordered was good but also a little strange. For starters the patty was in the shape of a flower. Don't get me wrong, it was cute, just also a little strange. Then there was the fact that there wasn't any lettuce, it was spinach and red onions. But in the end the burger was good and the side order of fries we ordered where very nicely done. The only disapointment I had was that at the end of the meal there was a drink menu and a dessert menu that had not been offered to us, which caused my dad and I much grief. (Also there was this really annoying face on a tree in the front of the restruant that really bugged me.)


KATIE: The Sweet Life Cafe....hmm. I pretty much think it was an average reseraunt, kind of mediocer. It had no vegitarian meals. So I ordered the omlet with no ham. It was good, but pretty much just an average omlet: eggs, peppers, tomaoes, . . . nothingg special. The coffee ice cream milk shake was amazing. The cafe had very good ice cream! The atmosphere was alright, but the hot waiter that served us made it even better. He messed up though, when we asked for drinks he didn't give us the drink menu which we later found out that they had, there was also a dessert menu that had some very good looking desserts on it that he decided not to give us! Out side on one of the trees was a very stange face that I don' think really added anything to the restraunt. All together though it was okay, but I wouldn't recomend it if you asked for a good place to get food, but I would recomend it as a very good ice crean place!