Soft opening of Capture Coffee in Fremont Food Hall offers a unique coffee spot in a chain filled area
A couple weeks ago, we noticed that the Fremont Food Hall had gone into soft opening. Having only 3 shops in there, perhaps due to limited space, we were excited to see a new coffee shop was one of them. Capture coffee offers coffee with an Asian flare. Their specialty coffees include lattes like the black sesame latte, banana latte and more. For smaller roaster/coffee shops, Fremont has names like Suju’s and Devout (who also runs their other popular location – Renegade by Devout) in different parts of Fremont. We’re glad that Central District is finally getting something other than the chain coffees.
Fremont Food Hall, at the time of writing, is open at 7am in the Central District near Din Ding Dumpling House. There are 3 ways to order. You can order at the counter of Capture Coffee’s shop itself; however, if you also want to order food from the other 2 stores, there are common self-serve kiosks where you can order from all 3 stores at once. The other way we’ve found to order is to order via Toast website. The best thing is that there’s virtually no wait! We recently tried ordering from the Philz app, time slots before 9am seem to be a very precious commodity; every time we select a time slot; it ends up being not available.
Unique specialty and room for improvement…
We ended up ordering 2 of their specialty lattes – a banana latte (cold) and an ube latte (hot). A big plus of Capture Coffee is that they mainly use oat milk or lactose free milk. That means no up-charge on alt milk! Perfect for lactose intolerant folks. And as such, both of our banana latte and ube latte uses oat milk. The banana latte is interesting. First, a fresh mashed banana lines the bottom of the drink. Oat milk is then poured in; espresso then tops the drink off. Ube coffee was already mixed when we got it. Capture Coffee does have their own blend of beans. We are unsure if they roast their own beans though. For the banana latte, banana acts as the sweetener for the drink; since it has a real banana in the drink, how sweet the drink highly depends on the banana you get. The fresh banana variable will introduce some variance between cups. We have to stress; this is not the Korean banana milk + coffee though maybe the drink would benefit if they had actually used Korean banana milk to help sweeten the coffee. The ube coffee on the other hand is a very consistent product as it did not taste like fresh ube but instead ube flavoring (and there’s nothing wrong with that!).
…But definitely worth a visit
Overall, we think the banana latte can benefit from using Korean banana milk to avoid inconsistencies between cups and the ube latte is good. Pay them a visit if you’re in the area! Especially with RawASF and Din Ding Dumpling House close by, Capture Coffee beats walking further out for Peets or Philz while you wait for food.
Capture Coffee opens 7am everyday!