LEO's Eats with Robin Garr
"You're taking forever to eat your soup," my wife grumbled. "What are you doing?"
"Juft a minip," I mumbled. I hate to talk with my mouth full. "... six, seven, eight ..."
This earned me a glare, but I kept on keeping on. "Garbanzo. Pinto. Great Northern. There's a lima."
As it turned out, I never did complete the project of identifying all of the beans in Earth Friends Cafe's 13-bean soup. I couldn't get past 11, even by counting a yellow corn kernel as a bean. But I can testify that it was homemade and very, very good, as was just about everything I tried at this recent arrival in NuLu.
Earth Friends Cafe (or EFC, as it calls itself) opened just last week in the space formerly occupied by La Bodega grocery and cafe in a faux-Italian storefront in Piazza Felice. EFC hit the ground running, having earned a place in the affections of our Southern Indiana neighbors with a spot on Grant Line Road and a cafe within the New Albany Floyd County Public Library.
The cafe's vibe carries a distinctly vegetarian and even vegan tone, but omnivores can coexist here in virtuous satisfaction. Even if you don't go plant-based, you can still dine virtuously, knowing that whatever's on your plate comes from sources that practice humane, natural and hormone-free stewardship. It's largely organic and mostly local, too, although that's kind of hard to accomplish with tuna.
The lunch menu, our server said, comes over pretty much intact from the Grant Line Road operation, which this facility replaces. About 18 or 20 dishes are categorized as vegetarian, vegan and omnivore, plus soups, salads and sides.
Everything on the menu is $8 to $10, including choice of side.
Read the full review on LouisvilleHotBytes,
http://www.louisvillehotbytes.com/vegan ... iends-cafe
And in LEO Weekly:
http://leoweekly.com/dining/vegan-omniv ... -caf%C3%A9
Earth Friends Café & Coffee Bar
829 E. Market St.
819-2758
facebook.com/EarthFriendsCafe
Rating: 89