Café Kem

The taro bubble tea is REALLY good! The owner was also very nice and patient. I’m definitely going back to try some more flavors

Café Kem has excellent service and the gelato and frozen yogurt are both very good. Please do yourself a favor and check it out!

Like other reviewers, often when I have come during open hours for Fro-​yo, they have not been open. Recently we enjoyed a sunny Saturday with temperatures in the 70’s, and thier Fro-​yo machine was not turned on.
I am excited for the offerings of this establishment, but am becoming impatient with how hard it has been to try them out.
Perhaps now that summer is coming, there will be more consistency.

I’ve recently become a fan of bubble tea, so I was excited to discover Café Kem. Being warned of their somewhat unreliable hours & offerings thanks to Unilocal,I cautiously ventured in one night after work. It’s a small, dimly lit space, and on this particular evening it was D-​E-​A-​D. The only person there was a young fella who works there, but was clearly spending most of his evening taking advantage of the free WiFi on his laptop. It did get me thinking that it might be a nice quiet place to hang out, clear one’s head and get some work done sometime.
So, like I said, I like bubble tea… but I’m still somewhat of a newbie, so I’m always open to suggestions for different flavor combinations. Unfortunately, the last man standing wasn’t much help in the recommendation department – that, and they were out of a couple flavors of jelly I wanted. So, I settled on a mango tea with passion fruit jellies. Yikes… not a good move. I’ve had a similar combo at the Tea Garden, and it was delicious, but this was WAY WAY WAY too sweet. I tried to power through it, but honestly ended up throwing over half of it away because I just couldn’t do it. Next time, hopefully they have some better options or someone working who can steer me in the right direction… also hope they have some of this frozen yogurt I’ve heard such good things about.
All in all, the jury’s still out on this one. I will certainly return to give them another try soon, so now go wait on the edge of your seat for an update: P

The best frozen yogurt I’ve ever had in my life. It actually tastes like yogurt! Yes, they are not open when I try to go sometimes, and they don’t have any yogurt left wh

When they are open (yes, even during their stated business hours) and when they actually have frozen yogurt, it’s amazing.
Good luck finding a time for both to happen. BUT… when it does, take advantage of it. There is no other yogurt like this in the Cities.

Clean. Fun seating. Boba. Awesome.
I like that the place has variety: yogurt, gelato, AND boba. It’s an excellent place to get your dessert fix. The boba balls themselves aren’t great; they were a bit hard.
What I really like about this place is the service. For a café, I don’t ever have the expectation for the server to check up on me, but he did here! Also, I came two day in a row with my friends and got a total of 8 drinks. I didn’t get any stamps the first day, but the second day, the server remembered me and game me 8 stamps (enough for a free drink). Cool!
Also, the café has a much friendlier atmosphere since the servers will often leave their little fort in the back and come out to the front to do homework or watch TV.

This Café was a great experience overall. The location is north of Lake Street, so the street parking is easier to find. I have been there multiple times and the staff remembered me and is always very kind. I have brought friends in and even when I was with a friend and her younger daughter, there is something there for everyone.
They serve food, but they don’t have a menu, so I do not recommend going there for dinner or with multiple people.
They have a wide range of different tea’s and drink combinations. They taste amazing and always have the greatest suggestions.
They also have 6 – 10 Gelato selections also, so if you don’t feel in the mood for a tea or coffee drink, the Gelato is delicious. They also have a softserve machine, so if you have anyone that wants an icecream sunday, great option. A little something for everyone.

Always friendly servers who somehow remembered my drink on my second visit! That encouraged me to come back. The bubble tea is good. I’m not an expert on the stuff, but the last sip always leaves me wanting more.

Before reading the rest of this just know that all fro-​yo taste the same to me. I come back for the convenience, the awesome toppings selection, and because of the price.
Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, I keep coming back because of the service, fro-​yo (fresh toppings, amazing fro-​yo flavors to choose from like mango, and they weigh by the ounce so you get to put on as much toppings as you like), free wifi, thai tea, and their banh mi!

I returned for another visit, earlier in the day, and was rewarded with the full toppings bar. I tell you, good frozen yogurt covered with fruit is PERFECT this time of year. They had some more exotic toppings, lychee and some asian jellies which I was not adventurous to try on this visit.
Glancing over the menu out of curiosity, I found they sandwich offerings a little scattershot. Of course they have the Jasmine bahn-​mi, but only the pork (no mock duck). There is a vegan sandwich of some sort on the menu.
Then they have some odd items: turkey panini and a caesar salad. Really? A Vietnamese café and you’re putting those throwaway dishes on the menu? I guess if I’m being strict, the gellato doesn’t belong either (but hell, that stuff is tasty).
I don’t know, I haven’t tried any of those so I can’t tell you if they’re any good or not. I can just say they seem a bit out of place, and I think Café Kem would do better to focus on their primary cuisine and the delectable offerings within than offer some generic American dishes.
Just in case you were wondering how I would run this business.

The last trip to Chicago introduced us to many venues serving frozen yogurt treats with fresh fruit toppings. Naturally we wanted to duplicate that experience here in the Twin Cities. After an exhaustive internet search by my wife, while shopping at Best Buy, we came upon this place.
Café Kem, owned by the same family that brought you Jasmine Deli, Jasmine 26 and Jasmine Orchid, is a marvelous place to enjoy frozen yogurt treats. You serve yourself from a selection of two kinds of yogurt from the soft serve machine, then head straight to the fruit bar for some fresh toppings. There was even lychee fruit! They then weigh your glorious creation and you pay by the ounce.
We didn’t taste the bubble tea, yet.
The location is convenient because it is on Eat Street. After filling up on Vietnamese, Malaysian, Thai, Greek or German food, you can finish off your meal with a healthy desert from Café Kem.
We might make a weekly pilgrimage to this place.

i’m from california. and i’m asian.
which means: i love frozen yogurt, and i crave boba.
frozen yogurt: hip hip hooray for tart yogurt and price per ounce!!! BOO FOR NO MOCHI and limited flavors (four). no mochi, so i asked for cheesecake bites — none of that either… i looked so upset about the missing toppings the guy apologized to me and explained that they were at least trying to get mochi in, haha.
boba: the milk tea was good, but tapioca balls were awful — very mushy. would NOT come here for boba.
but nice atmosphere and a good location to do work and meet up with people!

Loving soCal as much as I do and as big of a fan of YogurtLand as I am, I was ecstatic when I found this place. The frozen yogurt is comparable (though it could use more flavors) and some of the toppings could be more fresh but I loooooved the place. Now I can go here when I get my frozen yogurt cravings!
The boba (bubble) tea is good too. And cheaper than Tea Garden. Their banh mi sandwiches were delicious/​the bread was fresh, and the tuna sandwich was yum! Would definitely go again. And have recommended this place to friends.
:)

I can’t for the life of me figure out why this place is getting such high ratings. They are frequently out of food, and that includes frozen yogurt. In fact, I’ve never even seen the frozen yogurt everyone’s talking about!
This place had such potential, I was pretty excited about it, but they’ve consistently let me down.

Getting off the bus from Nicollet & 26^th, walking down past all the tiny Asian/​Mexican/​Middle Eastern/​etc. restaurants on Eat Street, then ending up in a place that reminds of Yogurtland in SoCal, I’ve never felt more at home in Minnesota. Yes, there is finally a place in Minneapolis (or at least the first I’m aware of) that sells fro-​yo, gelato and (FTW!) boba exclusively. Or bubble tea, whatever gringos call it. It’s such a foreign concept here, where four-​six months out of the year you’d be stark-​raving mad to go to a place like Café Kem for frozen dessert. But, in the neighborhood where I am seriously considering moving to, this place just might be a [normal] winning idea. I know I’ll definitely visit this place again, not just because they have the self-​serve fro-​yo, but also the place is actually really nice. I would say they need to eventually expand their fro-​yo flavor selections (I think right now there’s only four), as well as their toppings. They didn’t have any gelato prepared when I went there (around 6 PM), so I can’t comment on that, except that they should probably have it ready earlier? All in all, the Asian in me could not have been more happy to see a place like Café Kem in Mini finally!

My first frozen yogurt place and I like it. You get to serve the yogurt yourself and then move on to the toppings. There’s a wide range of toppings. You can be all grown up and put some the wide range of fresh fruit on or release your inner 5 year old and put M&Ms on there. I did both.
Great staff who patiently explained how the machines worked. I’ll be back if the weather ever improves.

This is the type of place that we’ve been missing in The Cities. For starters, I love the idea of buying yogurt by weight. How unique is that? For my first visit I had to try the Mango Bubble Tea w/​Tapioca «bubbles.» They call them treasures. I call them an very interesting improvement on tea. This place is going to be a hotspot this summer.

So me and three of my friends take me out to a new place on Eat Street. I think it’s been open for a while now, so I’m surprised there aren’t any reviews yet on Unilocal.Well? I liked the place.
It seems like your standard yogurt place with bubble tea, and it being on eat street, also offers banh mi as well. Today there were four yogurt flavors: fresh tart, cookies and cream, mango, and lychee. The original yogurt was not bad, not too sweet (which is perfect with toppings). My friend tried the cookies and cream, which was more chocolate than anything. I got a combination of lychee and mango, which was delicious. I liked the lychee the best, it tasted very fresh.
As with any yogurt place, there were a solid variety of toppings, ranging from granola/​cereal to grass jelly and other jellies, to fresh cut fruit like strawberries, watermelon, to dried fruit like apricots and cranberries, to candies like oreo bits, M&Ms, etc. At $ 0.42/oz, it was fairly reasonable.
We also got banh mi which used cold cut means (my friend had hoped for grilled meat). Honestly it wasn’t that bad of a sandwich. It came with chips, which I wasn’t sure what kind they were (pita?). They had a spicy seasoning on them as a word of warning.
Overall the service was solid, the atmosphere is less hectic than the Tea Gardens of the world. The color scheme seemed calming. And I also like the fact they have local artwork on the walls too, I believe from MCAD. And the free wifi is always a plus.
Not bad.