MADISON — Life Bowls is celebrating a tenth year in town. The restaurant, started by two native Madison residents, began as a roaming food truck whose favored stop was in front of the Madison Town Visitor Info Center. In 2019, when the munchies mobile set down roots as a café, it didn’t travel far. It settled a half a mile east on Boston Post Road in the heart of Madison’s downtown. In 2020, Life Bowls opened a younger sister café in New Haven.
Life Bowls takes its name from its signature fruit bowls. Consistent with its motto, “Eat, Drink, and Be Berry,” the café’s showpieces are two California-style bowls of fruit pudding topped with various sliced fresh fruits (featuring strawberries), honey (or if you wish, agave), dried coconut (shaved into strips), and crunchy granola (crunchy indeed).
Think of the fruit bowls as ice cream sundaes without the ice cream. Instead of fat- and sugar-laden ice cream, the puddings are blended in almond milk with one of two oversized berries, the pitaya and the açaí.
I know what you’re wondering.
Açaí is a small purplish roundish berry that grows from Amazonian palm trees. It’s twice the size and twenty times the price of a blueberry. Grocery stores sell açaí berries only as a frozen purée that’s more water than berries. Outside of jungles, it’s served mostly in smoothies and, as you’d guess, in açaí bowls. Don’t ask me how to pronounce “açaí.” I’ve heard it several ways.
Pitaya, also called Dragon Fruit, is the size of a Hass avocado in the shape of an ovate mango. It grows on cacti in Central America. Even if you’ve never eaten any, you might recall seeing them in food markets due to their eye-catching purple or magenta skin with horn-like scales that would adorn dragons, if dragons were real.
Perhaps you consider bowls of fruit as suitable only for breakfast or as beach food. Beach food, did you say? By no coincidence, Life Bowls is just a ten-minute drive from Hammonasset Beach State Park, Connecticut’s sandiest, largest, and longest state beach.
Because man does not live by fruit bowls alone, rounding out the short but diverse menu are salad bowls, oat bowls, veggie soups, fruit smoothies, coffee and sandwiches on bread from a local whole-grain bakery. A daily soup and daily special advertised on a small chalkboard are easy to overlook.
The soups, the pesto, the mayo, and the tzatziki are all labeled vegan. Except for whey powder available as an add-on, the menu is egg- and dairy-free, meaning no cow milk, not even for coffee. Except for honey that can be skipped and bee pollen that can be added, everything else is vegan. Life Bowls, however, keeps its near-vegan status a secret. It even seems to veil in secrecy that it’s entirely vegetarian, as that word is omitted from its lexicon.
Distinct from other vegan and vegetarian restaurants whose food is just dressed up junk food, the Life Bowls menu scores high grades for nutrition. Sky high. No fried foods, no mock meats, and no white sugar. Everything served here is both delicious and nutritious.
The café is across the street from R.J. Julia Booksellers and is next door to the Madison Cinema. The three form a triumvirate of lifestyle enrichment that alone make Madison worth visiting.
Two tables and a long counter provide seating indoors, but nearly year-round most customers choose the outdoor seating on a patio just outside the entrance. An expansive portico stretches overhead across several storefronts to the left and right of the movie theatre.
If you don’t snag street parking in front of the café, the spacious parking lot behind the building can be accessed by a walkway along the theatre. Parking throughout downtown Madison is welcoming and free.
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Mark Mathew Braunstein, a vegan since 1970 and the author of three books about the vegan diet, has contributed to CT Examiner five recent reviews of Connecticut’s other vegetarian and vegan eateries.