Café con Leche (Coffee with Milk) vs French Morning Coffee (Café au Lait)

Both drinks pair hot, steamed milk with dark coffee, but they arrive at quite different cups. Café con Leche starts from a concentrated double shot of espresso topped with a larger pour of full-fat milk, giving a compact, creamy drink in which the espresso's richness still leads. Café au Lait instead combines equal measures of very strong, dark-roasted coffee from a French press or drip machine with whole milk, yielding a bigger, rounder drink, sometimes crowned with a light whisked foam. In both, sugar is purely optional.