Listening to: Give a Little More - Maroon 5

Last night my wonderful girlfriend and I visited the newly reopened GEMS in Canley Vale.
It looks fantastic for starters. The ambiance is very lively, if only the staff members encompassed the same mindset. They're very timid and quiet. For a place as big as it is, they need to have more outgoing staff.

It's got the standard that most Vietnamese cafe's have: Smoothies, Coffee, etc.

But this place also has Cakes and Self Serve frozen yoghurt which probably makes this cafe stand out of the bunch of cafe's in the Canley area.

The frozen yoghurt is good, some people don't like it cause they think they put too much milk or ice, which in some flavours they do - admittedly. The flavours Anna and I got were Vanilla and Mango, Mango obviously for me. It tasted like mango yoghurt. Perfect. The Vanilla however had too much ice, ruined the sweetness and turned to be rather bland.

/edit. I went again and tried more flavours! The Banana and Strawberry are awesome. So I found the fruit ones were good, and the other flavours were a little bit overdone.

They have an awesome range of toppings, but be wary, the later you go - the crappier the toppings are. From what I saw, they don't changeover their toppings during the day. So if anything, go early in the day for frozen yoghurt. Early afternoon maybe? It'll be fresher then, they become really chill during the night.

For a Canley Vale Cafe, its rare for them to have a cake range. On view, Gems have a seemingly popular range of cakes that a lot of the patrons tended to go for more than one slice. The drinks however are a different story. Anna and I frequent cafe's a LOT. So we know good coffee from bad coffee and we know when something is made a little bit more dodgy than another.

I ordered a Mango Smoothie, which is usually a pretty safe bet in a Vietnamese cafe. It's pretty hard to stuff it up. But you need to ask them to double blend their blended drinks cause they're more worried about the time frame than the quality of their product. The mangoes weren't peeled and it was so icy that it wouldn't even go up the straw. I think I will stick to little star on that end.

If you know me, I don't drink coffee. Definitely a tea enthusiast. But Anna sure does, she's also very picky about it too. She also went for the standard. Vietnamese iced coffee. According to her, it was crap. Too much water, adding that with ice that's melting quicker than chocolate on a hot stove.

The service is lovely at the drinks and cake area. The yoghurt area is very awkward and quiet. They should really incorporate a script system. A list of things to say when customers come in because they exchange too many awkward glances.

Final judgement on product, definitely good for summer. But when the weather eases over, I think they'll find it hard to keep up with the competition and the Competition is rather vivid. 7/10. Extra point for the effort I suppose. Actually, I'd rate the whole place a 7.

Give it a try! Let me know what you thought 8)

Until next time, Comments? xx