Am I the last person you know to try an acai bowl? My niece and nephew seem to think so, and they are occasionally correct. It was Noah who mentioned them to me as we passed a store offering fruit bowls for lunch. Then I started asking around and it seems everyone has tried an acai bowl, and has been eating them for years. It’s not that I was never aware of them, they just existed on the periphery of my food journey – something like chicken wings or Orange Julius, ever-present but not a part of my life.
When asking around on what exactly an acai bowl was, the descriptions from friends were wildly off-the-mark and disparate; none of them made me particularly excited about the prospect of putting purple porridge into my body, especially if it was covered in blueberries, green bananas and granola.
As the universe would have it, down the street from my office a new cafe called ‘Blends and Brews’ had just opened, offering a multitude of shakes and smoothies, and about a dozen acai bowls. Taking a pic of the menu, I sent it around to friends and family to get their take on what my virgin acai experience should consist of, and I decided on the basic Acai Berry Bowl.
It was like a slippery frozen yogurt with icy bits, fruitfully tart with a decent amount of sweetness, and more about the toppings of strawberries, blueberries, granola and banana – a more healthy and colorful than a hot fudge sundae, but also a lot less fun. Give me that processed sugar any day. Still, I finished almost the entire bowl, leaving but one tainted blueberry. After it was done, I felt a little like I did the night I lost my gay virginity – slightly let-down, slightly satisfied, not quite hungry for more – the main difference being that I didn’t need to find a cab to take me home from an abandoned warehouse on the Mississippi river where it all went down. I digress…
{That was my fake look of disgust because blueberries were involved… and I won’t sully the end of this post with why I have an issue with blueberries – that’s for a rainier day.}
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