Not Only Juice

All meals are vegetarian and many are or can easily be made vegan. The staff is very knowledgeable and friendly! Most menu items are less than ten dollars. Everything is fresh and made quickly. NOJ is one of my favorite places to eat!

NOJ’s juices all are blends and are squeezed fresh in the morning, so if you arrive past 1pm you can choose only what remains in the fridge. (With increased patronage during the afternoon, this likely will change.) Most of the juice blends are heavy on fruits and light on vegetables, and no wheatgrass juice (not yet anyway). So the juice orientation is more on softcore sweetness than on hardcore nutrition. (I hope this too will change.)

Its ovo-vegetarianism harks back to the backward 20th century, as the burgers are made with chicken eggs. I hardly know of any newly opened restaurant calling itself vegetarian that serves chicken eggs, but this is Willimantic, a city behind the times, which in other ways is a good thing. Vegans still have much to choose from among the juices, smoothies, salads, and desserts. (The vegan cheesecake is fantastic!)

Nevertheless, all of the above is a good thing, else this café not survive in Willimantic, a burgers and pizza town. (Think raw foodist vegan Café Live around the corner, which four years ago lasted for all of three months before becoming Café Dead.) And judging by the enthusiasm of the staff and costumers, this café is a winner that is here to stay. Hurray!

I highly recommend this café, regardless of the degree of your veganism, because with vegan patronage the vegan menu likely will expand over time. Plan on eating here before shopping at the stellar Willimantic Food Coop just three blocks away, and you will have three reasons for coming to Willimantic. The third reason? To view also three blocks away the Disneyesque Frog Bridge.