(Un)sound Bites: Southpaw's Organic Cafe, A Left-Handed Compliment
In between errands one recent afternoon, I happened to walk—yes, walk—into Southpaw’s Organic Café. It’s lodged near Preston Road and Northwest Highway, across the street from Ross and Marshall’s. Although it’s a high traffic area, I was one of the cafe’s first ever customers. As the names suggests, Southpaw’s Organic offers fresh organic smoothies, sandwiches, and salads with Persian influences.
Well, the name doesn’t suggest Persian, actually. Owner Reza Anvarian, an amateur boxer with a wicked left handed jab, was born in Azerbaijan (which many believe to be a mythical place, but is quite real and wedged between Russia and Iran), opened the café with general manager Nick Vollrath and chef Luigi Troncoso, formerly of Trece.
The walls are covered with boxing photos and memorabilia, as well as bottles of nutritional supplements and signs proclaiming the absolute lack of sugar in the smoothies (they use only agave). Their Chocolate Monkey comes not with chocolate, but pure cacao (no, it’s not a starter kit). I settled on the Persian Thunder smoothie, a mixture of bananas, coconut milk, agave and soy.
“That’s what people drink back home in Azerbaijan,” Anvarian, who moved to the U.S. at 12, told me. “I drank it since I was a kid.”
The concoction tastes a bit like a pina colada…um, what us health nuts believe pina colada’s taste like…and it’s ridiculously good. Southpaw’s also dishes out hummus, a very good tabouleh, granola (homemade), salads, sandwiches, even an oven roasted chicken provolone.
Anyway, how can you go wrong at a place serving organic PB&J, with apple slices on the side? --Megan Feldman
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