Undercurrent Coffee

The people of Undercurrent Coffee are just awesome! My husband is a big fan! He also loves their Plaza Midwood location. This spot in Optimist Hall is a must! Great service with a smile!

Very cool place. Located inside a refurbished older large building that now consists of food stands, restaurants, and shops called Optimist Park. Barista was so sweet and awesome. I got a brown sugar vanilla cappuccino. I'm a former barista and can say she made the drink PERFECT. Was so yummy! Not overly sweet, perfect foam and even had latte art on top. My only con here was the lack of size options. There wasn't one for this drink. The cup was maybe 10oz? I also went back, as I had been sitting outside, to get another 10 mins before closing. There was someone washing dishes you could see in the back, but no one helped me and the register area looked shut down. Other than that, loved my experience and will be back.

Fantastic coffee with interesting seasonal flavors. The Cinnamon Bun latte is delicious. Always love grabbing something here after eating at one of the many great food vendors.

Very good coffee, this was the first coffee place I have gone where the person taking your order takes the time to explain the sizes so that you get the right size coffee and avoid assumption about the size of the cup. Good communication. Much appreciated.

Best hot chocolate ever. Bagels are delish too! Also love how they support local farms

Don’t know why you serve espresso shots in paper cups. Made sense in 2020 but pretty sad to do that to your product now.

Edit: I had a 3 star experience at the shop but the owner made this a 5 star experience overall. I looked forward to coming to Charlotte again to try Undercurrent again.

So glad undercurrent is at optimist hall as it's the only vender open and serving prior to 10/11. Got a few drinks (cold brew with oat milk, dirty chia with oat milk, golden milk latte) and each were good. Service was quick.

Order: Drip Coffee, Cappuccino
Price: $8
Positives: Good cappuccino, awesome space, can’t want to see once it’s all open
Negatives: No pour over, a tad weak
tldr: I’m super excited for this space in general. I love the whole “market” feel and I really think Undercurrent is going to bring a lot to the space. I will say that all the coffee had good flavor but tasted just a little weak for my preferences.

Thoughts: Even though we were only in Charlotte for a few days we went to a few different cafes. This is sort of a thing for us, we will often go to several coffee shops a day for up to five days before finally settling on our “regular”. We are aware we have a problem. Anyway something that I was beginning to notice is that very few places do poor overs. They just have a drip coffee and then espresso drinks. That’s super weird and jarring for me because most coffee places I like have pour overs, and it’s both one of my favorite ways to have my coffee made, and one of the most consistent ways to see if a coffee shop has high quality beans and a good brewing process. So the fact that none of these coffee shops could do a pour over kind of threw me.

Regardless, we got a drip coffee instead, and a cappuccino. Both of them were actually very good. I was honestly surprised at how good the drip coffee, was which is a testament to the quality of their coffee beans. Normally I don’t like drip coffee because it sits in an insulated container and gets so hot that it taste burnt. In this case it didn’t taste burnt at all, it still had depth and complexity of flavor. The cappuccino was very flavorful and rich. That being said, I do think that both of the drinks were on the weaker side for my taste but not as extreme as some other places I’ve been.

Undercurrent also has a unique scenario going on because they are in a market. The entire place is super cool and when it’s done, seems to be ready to be filled with places to hang out, a few small unique shops, and a bunch of restaurants. Right now it definitely isn’t finished (it being the market, Undercurrent is 100% up and running) and there’s only a handful of restaurants open but I can’t wait to see this place when it’s finished. I will definitely make a point to come back if I’m ever headed through Charlotte. For this current trip we just hung out for about 20 minutes and spent some time looking around and drinking our coffee, but I could definitely see people hanging out here for extended periods of time.

All in all I think Undercurrent is a pretty solid place to go get your coffee especially if you also need food or want to hang out with anyone. Like I said, the flavor was definitely there but for people who like really strong coffee this might not make the cut, or you may need to ask him to put more espresso in the drinks. But I know that my wife and I will be back in the future.

I ordered Ice Vanila Latte with half of almond & oat milk. The taste reminds me Not Just Coffee Shop. Anyway it was pretty good :)

Just had coffee but it was really good brew , took a little time though , I guess they were just getting in the working mode.