Vivot Craft Cafe

Vivot Craft Cafe isn’t your typical tea house. Located in Fullerton within walking distance of Qamaria Coffee, Khan Saab Desi Craft Kitchen, and It’s Boba Time, this cafe has become known for matcha latte flights – a local rarity that can’t be found even at tea flight shops such as Garden Grove’s Black Pearl and Orange’s Contra. It’s clear Vivot struck gold with this concept: The medium-sized cafe’s tables were completely full on both of our visits, with two-thirds drinking flights on a weekend day, and half sampling flights on a weekday evening. But even as huge matcha fans who go out of the way (and country) for novel Japanese green teas, we only liked rather than loved the matcha drinks we tried here.

Even if its execution isn’t perfect, Vivot overflows with ambition. Posters throughout the dining space translate the cafe’s theme (“evolve; become your best self”) into multiple languages – a nice branding move – and during our weekend visit, a countertop prep area displayed matcha in various stages of preparation, ranging from powder jars to bowls of dark green liquid. On the other hand, we never saw employees bussing or cleaning tables; guests carry their own drink glasses and wooden flight holders to and from tables. We only realized that our first table hadn’t been properly cleaned when we covered one of our shirts in someone’s leftover matcha slime.

Rather than posting menus on the walls, Vivot lines patrons up to order from a touchscreen – or speak with a person, if one is available – where two $19 (yes, $19) flight options are offered. One is “Fruit Matcha Flight,” mixing matcha tea with your choice of four milks (whole, almond, soy, or oat) and four of six fruit purees (strawberry, mango, blueberry, lychee, guava, or banana). Alternatively, “Cream Cloud Matcha Flight” mixes the matcha and milk with four of seven cream toppings (salted vanilla, ube, pandan, jasmine, matchamisu, coconut, or corn). Customers can also select sweetness levels for the drinks.

On our first visit, we picked the Cream Cloud flight, but found the four flavor differences to be subtle at best: Each drink had a strong matcha base, the same basic milky flavor, then a variably thick but modestly different flavored cream that needed to be mixed individually into the tea with a straw. If it wasn’t for the ube’s strong purple color and the pandan’s light green, we would have found them hard to tell apart from the salted vanilla and barely flavored “matchamisu.”

Each of the Cream Cloud drinks struck us as imbalanced – unpleasantly polar before being mixed, and not particularly distinctive once fully blended, either in flavor or texture. We felt strongly that the Cream Cloud flight should have been narrowed down into four really special drinks rather than left to chance with so many options.