Flow Health Bar is a vegan health food stall in Ward Place that serves up a range of salads and healthy juices. Their stuff is undoubtedly healthy; however, their menu can be a bit confusing and their food just wasn't as flavoursome as we hoped.
The Food & Drinks
If you're a vegan in Colombo, the choices are slim with just Milk & Honey, Délicieux and Wonderbar, with the latter two being home-cooks. There are other eateries like Calorie Counter that serve up a few vegan dishes, but finding them can be a tedious process. So Flow fits in well to fill out that niche. Considering the fact that everything is vegan, their menu is pretty impressive with salads, soups, mains and a few sweet offerings as well. Prices are around the same as contemporary restaurants with salads and mains ranging between Rs. 400 – Rs. 600, and since their currently take out only you'll need to factor in transport cost as well.
We tried three of their cold pressed juices; the Detoxifiyer, Spicy Sunrise and The Sunshine (Rs. 400 each). Cold pressed juices use a hydraulic press to extract juice, which are supposedly more nutritious, but they're also more expensive. The Detoxifiyer which was a mix of greens, cucumber, apple, lime and ginger was our favourite of the lot, tasting pretty close to a subtly sweet kola kanda, with a slight grainy texture because we asked them to add some vegan protein powder (Rs. 150).
The Spicy Sunrise was a hit and miss, with the spicyness not really sitting too well with everyone. The Sunshine, on the other hand, was a complete miss, which is weird since we expected the combination of pineapple and mango to work well together but that coconut milk just killed it. We understand that regular dairy can't be used here but the flavour of the coconut gave us a gag reflex. We suspect this would likely taste the same coming up as it did going down.
For our salad option we chose the mung & more (Rs. 400), which in our case came with mung beans, green beans, karawila, brinjals and tomato. The positive here was that the veges were fresh, even when we tried it a day later from the fridge. The problem, however, was the fact that this was barely a salad. It was more or less just servings of each vege, with everything other than the brinjals and karawila being boiled. It did come with a pesto which did add some needed flavour to it.
We picked the fuel pot (Rs. 500) from their savoury selection, but we were disappointed yet again. This had mixed yams and legumes with most of it being sweet potato. From a health stand-point sweet potatoes are one of the healthiest sources of carbs since it's slow digesting.
The biggest problem here was that half of the portion was inedible since the yams were grilled to the point where it was charred, so we ended up binning it.
To finish off we also tried their vegan truffles (Rs. 50 each). It tasted a bit odd at first, but I found myself liking it along the way. It reminded us a lot of Samaposha with its pasty texture, but this one had a more distinct flavour of peanut which we liked.
Service & Take-Out
Flow doesn't have a physical restaurant at the moment so you'll need to call ahead and pick up from their stall on Ward Place. You can call them up on 0777351548 to place your orders, which take around 2 hours to prepare. Also don't go too early, because they don't let you inside the building.
Conclusion
Flow's got a great theme with their all vegan offerings, but we feel they need to figure out how to offer more in terms of flavour since they do charge contemporary rates.
