Ayurveda Cafe Review

I was looking for a nice Indian place to eat at during my lunch break from work. After coming across many expensive, trendy places, I found a very different type of place. The Ayurveda Cafe on 706 Amsterdam Ave in NYC is a vegetarian Indian restaurant that serves meals based on a belief that every meal should have six different tastes. Their menu has only one pre-set meal that they serve and it changes every day. So I walk into the place and the first thing I see is a shrine of Indian gods and pamphlets about what they believe. I quickly grab one and pick a table at the front of the place to sit. All I had to do was pick a drink and choose between white or brown rice, and that was it. It was very refreshing not to have to stare at a menu and think about what's the right thing to order while an overbearing waitress looks over you.

The meal itself was placed on a large metal dish with rice and five little saucers containing five different foods. Each dish was suppose to represent something sweet, salty, sour, bitter, pungent, and astringent. I was wondering where the sixth dish was, but I would later find out that it would be for dessert. I tried to figure out which dish was suppose to be what taste, but it all blended together after a while.

The first dish was green and tasted like a spinach concoction, the second was chick peas in an orange sauce, the third was yogurt that had something orange in it, the fourth was like a tiny salad with fresh carrots, lettuce, and cabbage, and the fifth was lentils in a spicy sauce. Even though I wasn't really sure what I was eating, I didn't mind and I found it all very filling. When I ate all I could, they took my plate away and put a small dish in front of me. It had strands of what tasted like coconut in a sweet powder, it was very good. When the bill came, it was only about $15 for a six-course meal and a lemonade. For New York, that lunch is pretty cheap!