At Greenr cafe, move beyond paneer and soya and treat yourself with a platter full of rounded flavours. Ankita Jain reports
Greenr café is like a patch of carefully nurtured garden in the middle of maze-like alleys of ambient cafes and beautifully decorated stores. It is a modern Californian vegetarian kitchen with an interior which gives a touch of a work station with architecture books around and drop-down pendant lights.
The café’s menu doesn’t revolve around paneer and soya thankfully, as if there is not much that you can do with a wide array of vegetables. Rather it plays around the ingredients used abundantly in the countryside like jowar, bajra, ragi and so on. After much ado, we settled on the baked sweet potato wedges to kick-start our dinner. like the texture of sweet potatoes, this was not that soft which melts in the mouth. Instead it was crunchy and took to the chipotle sauce made with smoked dried jalapeños, plain yogurt, garlic and lime.
The customary starter done with, we proceed to the main course and zeroed in on a pizza named meatball bolognese with buffalo mozzarella and an earth bowl of vegan sausage. The thin crust pizza with a wheat base, tomato spread and meatballs which appeared like meat pieces but were actually balls made up of barley defied the perception of what it means to eat a largely plant-based meal. It was definitely a taste of wholesome vegetarian fare dipped in a homemade Neapolitan sauce—cooked mixture of garlic, tomatoes and sugar — and sparking our tastebuds at all the right places. After this healthy cuisine, the rice-lover in us was delighted as the waiter served a bowl of brown rice mixed in an orange tahini sauce which looked like sausage and was garnished with kale, red peppers, sweet onion hummus and pine nuts. This gourmet meal was full of flavours, a bit sweet, low on spices with great texture and layering. The faux appearance of non vegetarian dishes is not to tempt you but to surprise your expectations of the familiar. The taste is not faux but an explosion of flavours. This dish will surely pull us to this café quite often.
We finished our meal with a raw cheesecake pie which tasted as good as it looked. With a liberal amount of peanut butter, nuts, walnuts, almonds, cashews, dates and other nutty goodness with maple syrup and coconut milk, it was a wholesome wonder and worth every bite. Those who watch their calories might dread it, but well, when it tastes this good, who caresIJ
There are other elements in the café too that add to the “rustic vegetarian experience.” And the bill does not burn a hole in one’s pocket, Rs 350 being the highest price in the carte. It’s these little things that at least give you the idea of being vegetarian.