The Vintage 1979

For several years running, The Vintage 1979 has been Orange County’s premier Instagram-ready cafe, serving the most beautiful non-alcoholic drinks we’ve found anywhere in Orange County, and desserts that are similarly compelling – at least visually. Despite opening multiple new locations, however, their Japanese-inspired, Vietnamese-made offerings have become far less compelling to eat than they are to look at.

Due to heavy use of syrups, ice, and other ingredients that enable drinks to arrive in colorful layers, The Vintage’s cold beverages tend to be overly sweet, and its other desserts are mostly just one-note sweet without much complexity or intensity of other flavors. In some cases, aesthetically compelling items such as the shaved ice Butterflies Lemonade never appeared to have been tested for actual consumption; we found it incredibly hard to actually drink, eat, or whatever we were supposed to with a cup full of ice served with a disintegrating paper straw.

Similarly, The Vintage’s mini cakes have become more diverse and colorful than before, but the small but important details aren’t on the former Shokuh Patisserie’s level. An $8 rose raspberry dome cake had no obvious rose flavor besides a petal on top, a blue Hawaii Dome is essentially a pina colada cake with coconut exterior and a not especially fresh-tasting pineapple jelly cube filling, and the purple Blueberry Mousse was light on blueberry flavor. Coffee and chocolate desserts, typically slam dunks elsewhere, are weak here: Vietnamese Coffee Mousse tasted more like chocolate than coffee, and Tiramisu Chocolate Sponge was closer to a ball of condensed milk than chocolate or tiramisu.