The first thing you notice when you walk into Verse Collective, which opened in December 2017, is that it is very big. It's got lots of open spaces featuring industrial design, a cafe, a nice bar, a co-working space, a hostel and even a skate bowl for when you get tired of waves and want to hit some concrete.
There's a lot going on. We'll stick to the cafe experience for now.
The Food
The Whole Food Bowl (Rs. 727) is a dish with a vegan base. It's basically a bowl with chickpeas, cabbage, carrot, onions, tomatoes, cucumber and some mustard sauce/salad dressing on the side. Yes it's a little boring, and unless you’re into some sort of hard-core raw food diet the veggies could have been cut into smaller peices.
Thankfully you can get add-ons. We got some hummus (as a rule, always get hummus if they have it) for Rs. 272 and Tzatziki Chicken (Rs. 363). The hummus was a little dry and rather tasteless, with a little too much lime. The chicken was a tad dry also, and didn't bring a lot of flavor.
The Mexical Beef Rotti (Rs. 1272) turned out to be a rotti prepared like a taco. Thick and freshly made. A side note here on all the produce at Verse, it's very good and fresh. But something is missing in the combination, the flavors somehow don’t seem to come together to interact with each other to deliver that anticpated punch to the gut.
The portions are at least generous.
Dessert
The Afrogato (Rs. 590) is a espresso shot poured over vanilla ice cream. A plain vanilla desert that works. The Chocolate Chip Cookie (Rs. 180), in keeping with the rest of the food we tried, was rather boring.
Ambience
The garden is great to sit at on a cool night. Only a few seats have leaning arrangements, so if you need back-support try and bag one.
Service
Despite just having begun operations in December 2017, Verse's service game is on point.
Conclusion
There are better places for food in Hiriketiya, but Verse is worth a visit for its cool ambience.
