California-style earthy cafe

Both Mike's parents and my parents told us that we spent too much time working but not enough time to ourselves just to go out and have fun, so....

Taking their advice, we decided to give ourselves a work-free holiday this Sunday. It was a long break from eating out at a restaurant since Mike had a pretty bad food poisoning last Sunday night. After several days of "home-cooked food" (well... mostly just PBJ and canned soup, the best was some simple fried rice...), he finally regained appetite. (Thank god!!!) But to play safe (well... need to rebuild his confidence on restaurant food again), we went to a Western vegetarian cafe in Soho. (The rationale here is that he firmly believes that a western restaurant is cleaner than a Chinese restaurant...)

He chose an organic, vegetarian cafe at Soho called Life.

If I haven't been there myself and someone just gives me this picture and asks me to guess where this cafe is, I'll tell you it is a cafe in California. Check out that huge wooden wall-mounted wine bar/book shelf, the colorful chalk board with cursive font English menu and also the generally "chill" atmosphere of the cafe... (I can immediately name 5 or 6 cafes with that similar style and decoration in the Bay in San Francisco already).




Though the big windows exposing the semi-old looking tall flats outside betrayed the Californian-style decoration. ;)






















There are some other interesting decorations on the other side of the room. Don't ask me what those long, thin metal things hanging from the ceiling are, I have no idea... They do give the whole place an extra earthy feeling though. (as long as they don't fall, heh...) =D








Menu is earthy-looking too ;)
Both Chinese and English descriptions are present. But from what I saw that day, the customers were mostly westerners... Can't blame, just look at the price....









Mike, carefully picking his lunch from the menu.
Interestingly enough, he originally picked this cafe because they have his "long-missed" veggie burger; however, he ended up picking some other dishes. I asked him later why he didn't choose the veggie burger.

"What??!!!! They have it??? But I didn't see it in the menu..."

"You need new glasses..."

Though I personally think what really happened was that he got distracted by the diversity of the menu and forgot about his original "target".

Well, the truth is - it did't really matter, because... (to be continued...)








Mike's pick, some Mediterranean snack platter.
It has some fried pita-looking things, a whole roasted garlic, roasted peppers, some chewy flour biscuit thing (not the tasty type~), a few different types of olives, and a spoonful of avocado mix & some other bean mix. Some carrot and lettuce was added on top as a final touch.

Except the pita, everything on this plate was just so-so.... Kinda a waste, considering how many fresh, organic (as the restaurant claimed) ingredients were used in this dish....













For me, I ordered a "Nachos". Honestly, when I ordered this, I was expecting lots of lots of greasy chips with a yummy dip made from very unhealthy ingredients, such as cheese, sour cream, salsa, avocado mix, etc... (the American style).


Kinda like this - my imagined Nachos...











But it turned out to be like this

"Nachos" - the earthy, healthy (boring) version

They use wheat cracker-like pastries instead of the yummy greasy chips; and just mere avocado mix instead of the yummy cheese-salsa variety dip...

Very disappointed. . . =(




Lastly, the cauliflower and broccoli soup. Looked pretty good, but I ended up adding like 1/3 of the salt from the salt container into the soup... I have to say it's one of the tasteless western soup I have ever had...

And the bread - one word - stale...






You can imagine how disappointed we were (especially when the bill came)!!

I guess the conclusion of the day is that branching-out does not guarantee you good results (especially when it comes to food)!!! ;)

Hehe... but I still believe - you won't know, unless you try !!! So I think we'll keep trying new stuff!!!