One of the places we went during the trip was to a luxury grocery store called Erewhon. The idea was to go and take photos of all the weird and novel trendy/Indie brands that we don’t have access to here and Canada to bring back as inspiration and to see what ingredients/flavours are trending – but it was a massive store and in total we probably took close to a thousand pictures of products.
We bought a lot of different drinks to taste at our hotel – probably close to thirty different RTDs across a whole spread of companies and beverage categories. I’ll have tasting notes up for some of them, since there was no shortage of expensive trendy and functional tea related RTDs – but not everything we sampled was tea specifically.
In addition to just ransacking the beverage aisle, we also got drinks at their smoothie bar. Erewhon has a very prominent partnership with Rishi – specifically with their matcha assortment. So, on huge chunk of their drink bar menu is dedicated exclusively to luxury drinks made with Rishi matcha. I’ve had Rishi’s matcha on its own before so I wasn’t quite so interested to just order a regular matcha, matcha shot or matcha latte. Instead I went with this key lime pie beverage.
I don’t remember all the ingredients but some of the prominent ones were of course matcha and lime juice, but also a generous amount of avocado. The drink is very thick with a noticeably dense and kind of slimy mouthfeel from all the blended up avocado. Despite that, it’s also got a kind of airy frothy component as well that makes it feel a little less heavy as you’re drinking it. Plus, the taste was very bright. You got a whole lot of lime in the top notes but it was fresh and zesty, and just super palatable despite that zing quality. After the wave of citrus kind of passed, what was left was more of a creamy umami and grassy note.
It was actually incredibly delicious and I have finished my drink was faster than I’d realized. They’re pretty damn expensive smoothies unfortunately, but really cost would be the only thing stopping me from buying this again. Well other than, like, living in a different country. If I lived in the area, I think it would be pretty hard to not spend a lot of time at this store; anyone who falls into the “trap” of needing to explore different foods/flavours would probably be able to buy a unique item from here without ever repeating products for probably close to a decade.
