review

Simplys: Vegetarian mecca

 

It's 12:25pm on any given weekday and I’m fighting my way to the counter through a crowd of women. Clutching their oversized handbags with one arm and frantically salad selecting with the other, the healthy goodness is packed into clear containers to be shipped back to the office. It's not nice to generalise, so I should also mention the token hippy sporting a 70's inspired floral dress with hair tired up in an awkward mess to one side. Oh yeah, and two men, a European backpacker and myself. I’m sure you’ve guessed by now (or read the title of this review) that I'm at Simplys.

f you’re living at KFC, Simplys is the Darwin CBD mecca for vegetarians, the health conscious, and people convincing themselves that they are both. Ok, so I’m up. Today I chose the veggie pasty, only because I haven’t tried it before. Now for the complicated bit: Salad selection. I guess there are two schools of thought when having so many options; go to town and sample everything, or select only a few and actually know what you are eating. I went for the latter, choosing Brown Rice & Peanuts, Potato Salad and Baby Corn & Spinach. Now, I’ve never eaten a pasty with a knife and fork, but I gave it a real honest shot. The pasty was good, nice texture and very rich with flavour; a far cry from your standard run of the mill potato filled bakery pasty. I do however have to question if the pastry was a sneaky frozen puff. I’m thinking this because it reminded me of a pasty my grandma once made me and I know for a fact that she uses puff pastry! Never the less, it was a good pasty.

've never thought about reviewing Potato Salad before. It’s one of those side dishes that you just expect to taste a certain way. You have expectations of the texture, the creamy sauce, the tanginess, the sweetness, right down to the flecks of green throughout the dish. And when it doesn't taste how you’d expect, alarm bells start ringing. Thankfully, in this case, the Potato Salad went according to my sensory plans. The other salads were tasty and a good filler also. I’m mad about baby corn. I could just eat it out of the can. I’m also mad about baby spinach, so of course I was going to love the Baby Corn & Spinach salad! It had a nice touch of semi sundried tomatoes and a tomato based pesto which capped it off well.

The Brown Rice salad is a must for me also. It’s tasty and the saving grace if you are still hungry. It’s supposed to be pretty good for you too. So why do the crowds flock to Simplys every lunch? Is it customary self-clearing of the plates into the blue tubs provided? Is it the $10 price tag so that you don’t have to deal with coins? Or is the feeling of knowing that your body is being nourished the way it should be every day? I’d say it’s D, all of the above.

Simply's Contact details

Address: Shop 1b, Star Village Arcade, The Mall, 32 Smith Street , Darwin
Phone: 8981 4765