Café 308

Yet another health-conscious dining joint. This time, it’s Café 308, the dining extension of wellness center Verita Advanced Wellness. The wide offering includes not just vegetarian food—there’s seafood, chicken and even beef stew; top that with healthily-prepared food items with zero artificial additives, colorings, flavorings, preservatives and trans fats—all pretty impressive. It’s a bit of a pain to come here if you don’t drive, but the 20 or so fruit juices and smoothies are certainly on the money. We absolutely love the Ruby Root ($9) and Camu Immune ($10), the former a delicious and refreshing concoction of organic beetroot, apple and carrot juices with a touch of ginger, nutmeg and calamansi, and the latter a mix of camu camu (supposedly an anti-viral, anti-depressant rainforest fruit), organic apple, carrot and ginger, which purports to boost the immune system—although some might find it a tad hard to swallow due to the camu camu’s strong smell. The fantastic drinks aside, the food here is less than stellar. Our Cobb salad ($14), one of the recommended dishes, was pretty flat taste-wise; although we’re not complaining about the generous serving of avocado, greens and hard boiled eggs. The herb-crusted salmon fillet ($22) was fresh and flavorsome just like the food doctor ordered, and its accompaniment of quinoa pilaf was a nice touch. While the food here isn’t anything to write home about and there were hardly any desserts on the menu (only three options), this simple café does provide a welcome respite. The plethora of healthy and delicious fruit juice blends is enough to lure us back.