Candy and Green restaurant review: All veg, all right

From Jains to hipsters, South Mumbai’s latest vegetarian restaurant has something for everyone.

Seven words came to mind when we looked through the menu of Breach Candy’s new all-vegetarian Candy and Green: hipster food with a special Jain section.

The restaurant’s name is oddly appropriate. The menu’s opening page describes the eatery with phrases like, ‘a space for the community, and wider city [...] where ingredients reign over limiting boundaries of cuisines’. The food is thus, ‘free of meat, eggs and any nasties’, and their customer, like ‘everybody, is a sum of their healthy and hedonistic halves’. To this end, it also specifies that they have, along with cocktails, wellness drinks and cold-pressed juices featuring herbs from the deck-like roof garden.

The interiors of Candy and Green are vibrant and well-lit, in part due to the tall windows and high roof.

The food spans major cuisines across the northern hemisphere. There is a ‘favourite’ kale salad, a vegan panzanella omelette, a burrata cheese board, sesame soba noodles, a naked veggie burger, beetroot chips, and ‘grown-up’ pancakes.

The Jain menu is an edit of these. Of course, avocado toast features on both – but because this is Bhulabhai Desai Road and not Brooklyn, it’s subject to availability.

We suspect this is also the reason why CAG’s service staff bows and beams for groups of older lunching ladies from the neighbourhood. To get the staff’s attention, even on a good day, the rest of us must raise one hand high, like kids in a classroom. On a bad day, a frantic hip-hop double-arm wave can make little difference.

The otherwise-cool zucchini parcel with toasted nuts, apricot nubs, and ricotta is kindled by a chilli aioli.

Still, a lot of what we tried in the high-roofed, tall-windowed, pretty and sunlit main dining room was also pretty tasty.

This city has better tortilla soup. At CAG, it’s really only an intense tomato soup; perhaps they should rename it to manage expectations. The risotto looks like glossy onyx gravel – chewy, cheese-scented, black rice cloaking bits of mushroom and confit garlic. We heated up refrigerated leftovers two days later, and they still tasted good.

The tortilla soup, which tastes more like an intense tomato soup, was a sore point on an otherwise good menu.

An occasional off-menu dessert of warmly spiced zucchini teacake with caramel sauce is well hydrated despite its dense crumb. Layer some vegan cream cheese icing, and hipsters and aunties will both approve.

HT reviews anonymously and pays for all meals