Bandra is fast turning into a hip gourmet hub with fine dining getting replaced by café-culture with casual seating, crammed spaces, low lighting and good, good food.
The Sequel, sitting on one of Bandra’s busiest roads, is a tiny café that serves gluten-free meals only. Their menu is a lexicon of ingredients, making the process of going through the menu and ordering pretty tiring. Apart from gluten-free, they have a good portion of the menu vegan and most ingredients sourced here are organic.
Food:
We ordered for the Coconut milk smoothie (was a special that day), Kale chips, Homemade cracker, Red-Pirate salad and Piece of cake (quinoa patties).
The organic Peruvian cacao (and you’ll read this ingredient almost everywhere on the menu), maca powder, coconut milk smoothie was delicious. We call it the Monday morning rescue drink, just perfectly chocolate-ed. Since we were here early we didn’t mind guzzling down this smoothie but be warned it can be quite filling.
The Red-Pirate salad was an intriguing mix of ingredients and colours with tri-color quinoa, tender kale, roasted baby beets, roasted baby carrots, roasted chickpeas, red apple, prunes, Kashmiri walnuts and red wine vinaigrette (phew!) We loved the vibrant presentation of the salad and took a few seconds just looking at it before we finally devoured it. The salad was interesting, flavorsome, and scrumptious, we highly recommend it. The homemade crackers served in cute little glasses, offer just the right crunch with the salad. These gluten-free sides made with buckwheat, almonds and chia seeds were delicious, nut-buttery and crispy. The kale chips were slightly burnt and could have used less oil, but munch-able nonetheless.
Piece of cake (quinoa patties) – The owner’s recommendation turned out spot-on with this visually delightful quinoa patties served with tomato salsa, adding just the right zing to the dish. Only thing, with just 2 patties served as main course, it will be likely that you will return home only to raid the fridge at midnight!
For dessert we ordered Chocolate Lust and Blueberry muffin.
The Chocolate Lust is an almond butter cookie with dark-chocolate chips and a giant strawberry. This vegan, soy free dessert is a soft, crumbly, full of flavor cookie that melts in the mouth and tastes mind-blowing. True to the name, they usually run out of this dessert as soon as they bake them and we hear the dish has a loyal fan following, despite the place being only a couple of weeks old!
The Blueberry muffin was a tiny bite-size cup-cake delicately sweetened with fruits (raspberry and blueberry) and no sugar. This could be a good thing or a bad thing– we will not recommend it unless you have a seasoned taste for healthy, sugar-free desserts. For those who do, this muffin could well be consumed for breakfast considering how healthy it is!
Ambience
The place is compact and efficiently used. The large photographs symbolic of yoga poses on both the walls are interesting. You could enter this eatery and feel like you are in any part of the world –with its international, tidy café look.
When crowded, the place may seem a little claustrophobic (we hear they’re planning on expanding the place soon).
Service
The owner, Vaanika is a delight to interact with and has plenty of suggestions to suit individual taste buds. For a weekday, the place started to fill up quite fast and we felt they needed more staff to run around for small things.
We also think a little note on what gluten is and the health benefits of going gluten-free can add a great deal of value to the curious and not-so-aware customers.
