With bright pink "love hearts" decorating the walls and a great selection of cafe food and drinks, this is the perfect cafe to visit for February, the month of Valentine's Day or Galentine's Day. Élan Cafe now has five different branches in London, and this one is their most recent addition. It is located in Knightsbridge and next to Harrods department store on Hans Crescent. The basement of the cafe contains the love heart walls with additional seating and neon signs while upstairs boasts a collection of carousel horses and a pink flower wall.
Élan Cafe started with coffee and using fine ingredients in their cafe; they had teamed up with Union coffee, which buys coffee beans direct from the farmers. They also pride themselves on recycling as much as they can with the remains of the coffee beans being sold to be used in cosmetics. They have been in partnership with Union since 2001 but have greatly expanded recently. They have taken Instagram by storm due to their picture-perfect flower wall displays, and this enabled them to open their second branch at the end of 2017 with three more branches opened since then.
The love heart wall features modern and traditional messages with "on fleek", "YOLO", "Marry Me", "Lit", "Be Happy", "Boss Lady", "Be Mine", and "Think Pink" being some of the messages. There is a pink overkill in the basement of the Hans Crescent cafe, though this is offset against a dark pink marble table.
I also loved the colourful pastel balloons upstairs where the carousel horses are.
First up, I had the hot chocolate. And I also bought the pink macaroon, pistachio croissant, and rose and pistachio cake. I was not too keen on the hot chocolate because it was just water with flakes of chocolate that really did not melt much, and I am just not keen on this type of hot chocolate. (I'm not a coffee drinker, so I did not have the coffee.) The pistachio and rose cake did taste nice, though I found most of the flavour was actually in the icing instead of the sponge. The macaroon was also nice, and I loved the design of it. I had the pistachio croissant later in the day, and it was my favourite of the items. I also loved that it was bright green. They also had other flavours in additional bright colours.
Overall, the food was good, although the service was just a little bit disappointing and with a slight language barrier in the staff (which is probably how part of my order was mixed up but corrected). I know that some people complained about waiting times and bad food and service, but I did not have major issues here. I did visit very early on a work day and before I started work, and only a couple of people turned up. I had one of the coveted love heart booths to myself. However, I will suggest one big improvement. I would love to see more heart themes in their food and drink offerings to mimic the love heart theme, particularly for Valentine's Day/Galentine's Day.
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