In the heart of midtown Ventura, Calif., a unique and delicious cafe has opened: Daylight and Moon Cafe. Located on Loma Vista Road, the cafe serves a variety of options, including drinks such as coffee, tea and local beers and wines. However, the cafe’s culinary specialty is something rather unexpected yet delightful: toast.
Open Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Daylight and Moon Cafe offers a rustic atmosphere and good vibes. Many interesting menu items, such as their signature drinks and plethora of unique toasts ranging from savory to sweet, make the cafe alluring to many who want to try something new.
Upon walking into the cafe, customers are greeted with a colorful yet chic atmosphere, with brightly colored walls and home-like decorations including plants and books featuring photos of Ventura. The cafe has 16 drinks on the menu, not including the local beers and wines, made with locally roasted coffee and organic ingredients.
With the option of being served either hot or iced upon request, the menu varies from espresso and americano to matcha and chai lattes. However, the highlight of the drink menu is Daylight and Moon Cafe’s signature drinks: Venturan, Lavender Haze, Vietnamese and Cafe de Olla, each costing $5.25.
The four signature drinks, despite having a variety of different ingredients, all ended up tasting very similar, excluding the Lavender Haze, which offered a unique lavender flavor. The other three, however, all had almost indistinguishable tastes due to the common base of espresso and milk.
Nonetheless, these signature lattes were worth trying, especially the Cafe de Olla, which had a perfect blend of bitter espresso, sweet panela syrup and cinnamon syrup that was just sweet and flavorful enough without being overwhelming.
However, what deserves the most attention at Daylight and Moon Cafe is the toast menu. Featuring nine different options in addition to the daily specials, toast is served all day, offered on bread choices such as white, sourdough, gluten free and flatbread. The toasts vary from savory to sweet.
If you’re looking for a savory toast, a great option to try is the Cucumber Dill. For $10, the toast is topped with cream cheese, cucumber, dill, preserved lemon and pine nuts. This is perfectly refreshing for a warm day, with cool cucumber and tangy dill being wonderfully complementary. My only issue with this dish was that it was almost too salty for my taste.
Another wonderful savory toast was the Avocado toast, costing $10 as well. Despite being a timeless classic without much variance, Daylight and Moon Cafe found a way to reinvent Avocado toast.
With avocado, pomegranate, chili flakes, pepitas, tomato, sprouts, red onion, lemon and balsamic glaze, the Avocado toast was bursting with so many flavors it was almost overwhelming. However, the blend made perfect sense, with neutral, refreshing, tangy and spicy flavors all being tied together to make an unexpectedly impressive menu item.
Aside from the many savory items on the toast menu, one particularly sweet, dessert-like option stands out as well: the Cookie Butter toast. With Lotus Biscoff cookie butter, strawberries, banana and granola, this toast was much more simplistic than some other menu items, costing $8.
However, the Cookie Butter toast did not disappoint. It was perfectly sweet, with a warm, nostalgic flavor from the Lotus Biscoff cookie butter meshing perfectly with the light and refreshing taste of the fruit.
Although this taste was vastly different from the other toasts I tried, the Cookie Butter was one of my favorites, making me want to have dessert for breakfast every day.
Despite only being open since early November, Daylight and Moon Cafe is already doing wonderfully, with a variety of people passing through in the middle of the day to try out the different drinks and toasts. The bright atmosphere and unique flavors offered on the menu make for a perfect place for a brunch snack. So if you’re ever passing through midtown Ventura and would like to try out a new and interesting cafe, Daylight and Moon Cafe is the perfect place to stop.
