A La Mousse

A La Mousse trades on North 11th Street in Chinatown, and its shape is one Philadelphia has surprisingly few of: a dessert cafe that opens at midday, runs until eleven at night and midnight at weekends, and holds no liquor licence at all. It is the kind of room where a group can sit down at half past nine on a Saturday without anybody's evening being organised around a bar.

The drinks divide into three families. The fruit teas are the house's signature — a mango lychee, a passion fruit peach — brewed as tea and built with real fruit rather than syrup alone, which gives them the tannic backbone that stops a fruit drink from reading as squash. The lemonades run alongside them, a pomegranate strawberry and a lemonade mint tea, both sharp rather than sweet. Then there are the milk-foam teas, a Taiwanese format in which a salted, lightly whipped dairy cap sits on top of cold tea: the rose and the oolong versions are the ones to order, and the technique matters because the salt in the foam cuts the sugar underneath and gives the drink two distinct halves as you go down the glass.

The matcha list is longer than most dedicated coffee shops manage — a cherry blossom matcha latte, plus peach, coconut and almond milk builds — and there is a buttercream Oreo milkshake for anyone who has given up pretending.

The cakes are the other half of the business and are what the name refers to. That is worth saying plainly for a non-drinking audience: the hardest part of an evening without alcohol is often the last hour, when a drinking group orders another round and there is nothing to order alongside them. A dessert menu at eleven at night solves that better than any mocktail does.

On alcohol, the position is evidence-based — the menu carries no alcoholic item and the venue holds no licence — rather than a claim the business makes in those words. Nothing psychoactive beyond tea and coffee is served.