Metrolife: Driven by coffee

The vegetarian cafe on Residency Road is spacious. The interiors remind you of a clean garage. There are a number of superbikes inside the cafe. The empty oil barrels, tyres and cycles placed around complete the biking ambience.

From bar stools to sofas, ‘Driven Cafe’ has them all. There is also a wide range of paintings of cars, comics and dark matte enamels on the walls painted on the bricked walls.

Since it is a dim lit cafe, you might find it difficult to see your food. I went to ‘Driven Cafe’ with a friend and we switched four tables to find a good enough table to enjoy our meal.

Don’t wait at the table for your order to be taken — it’s a self-service cafe. Once you place the order of the A4 sheet menu, you are given a telecommunicator. You will be alerted when the order is ready; be warned, it’s a slightly scary alarm.

Their menu is quite interesting though. While we mostly see ‘appetisers’ or ‘mains’ category in other restaurants, they have named theirs ‘first gear’ and ‘cruise’.

We started with ‘Mediterranean Crostini’, bread is topped with pieces of carrots, bell peppers, cucumber and cheese. The crostini is a remake of classic garlic bread but with bland toppings.

The ‘Maggi Sandwich’ was our next order. We were quite excited about this but the excitement didn’t last long. The first layer of the sandwich was stacked with cucumber, onions and cheese and the second layer had Maggi. Let’s just say that the whole combination was great. It had absolutely no taste of Maggi noodles or the vegetable — we could only taste the cheese. The fizzed cocktail ‘Son of a Peach’ was the best thing there. It had a peachy and fizzy flavour with tangerines lemon.

The last thing we dared to taste was their ‘Tuscan Turn’ pizza. The thin crust pizza was topped with yellow bell pepper, zucchini, tomatoes, green olives and grated carrot. By the time we went to collect the pizza from the counter, it was soggy and the crust was not cooked properly. We had to ask for a replacement. In the meantime, we were given complimentary ‘Onion Pakodas’.

The pizza looked better the second time around. But the taste didn’t match up. It was bland and had no spices except oregano and some salt.

‘Driven Cafe’ is known for the coffee served as it is from different parts of the world. Go check out the interiors, rent a bike, sip on some coffee. Try anything else and you may want to put on the brakes.