#50: Ugly Mug Cafe - U District

The first, well, fifteith, coffeeshop on the list is "Ugly Mug," a place in the U-district. Kristy, my roommate, came with me to this one... well, she drove us there, so I guess I went with her. We got close to the location with relative ease, that is until the giant orange cones and detour signs blocked our path to the coffeeshop. So, we gave up and went home.

Just kidding.

We parked a block away and walked. It was unclear if we could walk around the barriers, but we saw an 80-year-old woman walking in that direction, so we were pretty confident that if she could do it, so could we. It turns out that we were right. About 100 feet after the detour, we made it to Ugly Mug.

Ugly Mug is a very small, rustic little coffee shop,with wooden tables, odd, slightly-creepy old-timey paintings, and a couch. The barista at the front was very friendly as we contemplated what to order. I ordered a 16-oz nonfat latte and Kristy ordered a 16-oz caramel americano. My drink was $3.63, a pretty standard price. As we waited for the drinks to be called out, we sat at one of the wooden tables. Next to us was another table, occupied by two college-aged girls who seemed to be going through some sort of quarterlife crisis. Kristy and I were about to be very sympathetic to their plight, as the whole, "I don't know what I'm doing with my life" trains of thought are not something foreign to either of us. However, when we started rudely eavesdropping with more conviction, we found out that they were talking about fonts. Not the insignificance of what they were doing with their lives, but fonts. Fonts. So, suffice it to say that we no longer gave a fuck about their struggles.

My drink came out first, and it looked pretty great:

It tasted.. mediocre. The foam was really nice, but the flavor of the espresso was a touch burnt. It also was lukewarm at best and cooled down even further very rapidly. I drank about 70% of it before I gave up on it.

After much debate, we decided to purchase a delicious-looking cookie from a case that we had both noticed upon first entering this establishment. I'll spare you the painful details, but it took about ten minutes to decide upon whether or not to buy this cookie. We were also distracted by a rather attractive man who entered the store wearing sweats. If you know either of us at all, sweats on men is where it's at. So, understandably, we abandoned all talk of cookies in favor of what some may refer to as "creepy staring," but I like to refer to as "admiring from afar" (although, 'afar' in this case was approximately 4 feet). After attractive sweats-man left, we continued debating this cookie. Given the amount of time it took to decide to buy this cookie, my expectations for it were through the fucking roof. Of course, this poor unsuspecting cookie did not meet these high expectations, but it was pretty decent. A bit greasy, which I wasn't expecting, but fine.

It was time to leave, but, I had to go to the bathroom. So, I did. In the bathroom I found this mirror, which says "You Look Gorgeous" on it:

I told Kristy that she had to go into the bathroom and take the same picture so I could add both of the pictures here. She did, but as you can tell, she isn't the world's greatest at getting the intended target (i.e. the words) into the picture.


So, that's about it. We left the shop just as a large group of about eight UW students came in, so, yay for timing.

You can visit Ugly Mug here: