5R Cafe and Kitchen: If you're looking out for your health...

Area: Chikusa Station 千種駅、about 200m east of exit 4
Restaurant:  5R Cafe & Kitchen  (Shizen no kusuri-bako)  自然の薬箱　カフェ＆キッチン
Website: http://five-r.co.jp/cafe.html
Map:  http://tabelog.com/aichi/A2301/A230106/23038454/

Hours:  11am-9pm (LO 8pm), Closed Wednesdays 

This cafe is located on the second floor of a health and wellness centre where they sell herbal medicines and cosmetics, you can have acupuncture, a massage, do yoga, attend lectures and so on.  You can be sure that their cafe will try to serve healthy food.  The calories are even listed on the menu board.  The lunch is 1000 yen, and today there was a choice between fried fish and cream stewed chicken.  Both start off with a salad;  you can telll a salad is put together with care when the tomatoes are skinned and there is daikon that looks like watermelon.  It's nice that you can try 2 different types of dressings.  The carrot and apple dressing had a nice natural sweetness, the flavour of apple being a bit stronger than the carrot.  It did still have a vinegary tang to it to make it a refreshing salad dressing.  The negi (green onion) dressing was more Asian in flavour with a very mild onion accent.  When the salad was reaching its last greens, the mixture of the two dressings melded well.

Next, the soup;  cabbage and spice soup. Usually I wouldn't think that adding a soup for 300円 is a good deal, but I'm glad that I did.  The milk foam was a nice touch to give the soup a creamy texture. The flavour of cabbage was there, but strangely there were no pieces of cabbage.  It was probably made from mostly cabbage broth, but if it were a purée, it's one of the smoothest purées I've ever seen. There were chunks of undercooked carrot floating around but the steamed broccoli with a slight crunch was nice when the florets soak up some of the soup.  

On the main plate (I chose the fish fry) were 2 vegetable sides, whole grained bread (you can also choose multi-grain rice) and the main.  The wakame (seaweed) and na no hana were very lightly seasoned, if it were seasoned at all.  The stewed and chilled cold gobo and renkon was sweet, yet had umami from the soy sauce and mushrooms.  They also had a nice crunchy texture.  The lemon juice sprinkled fish was a bit dry and didn't go well at all with the mushroom purée on the side. Somehow the combination of lemon and strong mushroom made the fish taste like the sea. It definitely went better with the pink daikon oroshi, which was slightly sweet and mellowed out the lemon.  The nagaimo (a high water content potato, slimy in texture) had a nice crunch and I enjoyed it on its own, the same as with the fried shiso leaves. I wouldn't be surprised if I were told they bake their bread everyday as it was fresh with a nice chewy bite to it. 

Overall, a cafe definitely geared towards women with a menu abundant in vegetables and mild flavours.  Although they slightly failed in some of the flavour combos, I give this cafe credit for trying out new dishes.