Enjoying the warm weather? In the mood for some early-summer fruit? Now you can take the edge off the impending doom of finals with a visit to Playa Bowls!

A Playa Bowls location has popped up on Broadway and 110th! It has an overwhelming range of fruit bowl and smoothie menu items, and brings fun summery vibes to the corner opposite from CVS, but is it worth the price? Former Tech Editor Solo Dzhaman and Events Editor Ava Slocum offer some thoughts.

Initial Impressions:

Solo: The vibes here are great. Super colorful, fun, and the music was energetic. It was also packed, not a single seat available, so it seems to be pretty popular among students even though it opened so recently (rip VitaminShoppe). 

Ava: It’s cute! I’ve walked by the storefront so many times and kept meaning to go in and check it out, and it didn’t disappoint. Really pretty, and beachy vibes inside, with skull/pineapple/mermaid art on the walls and a leafy wall mural on one side. The menu was really extensive, with so many different kinds of açai bowls, playa bowls, and smoothies, and options for $2 add-ons, ranging from relatively normal things like extra fruit or a Nutella drizzle to random superfoods and bee pollen (?). There was a surprising amount of seating space with students sitting at little tables inside. The service was also super fast—we ordered and then got our bowls almost immediately. Pretty pricey, but that’s probably to be expected for a hip little smoothie/fruit bowl place in New York.

What We Got:

We got an açai bowl and a pitaya (dragonfruit) bowl, though Playa Bowls also has smoothies and coffee. Ava got the “Power” açai bowl with chocolate protein, granola, banana, and peanut butter, and Solo got the “Dragonberry” pitaya bowl with granola, strawberries, blueberries, and honey. Each one was $13.95 before tax and tip, which feels pretty standard for smoothie bowl places. Everything on the menu sounded really good—picking was hard! This review also cannot speak to Playa Bowls’s smoothies since neither of us got one (maybe next time).

What We Thought:

“Power” Açai Bowl

• Blended: açai, chocolate protein
• Topped with: banana slices, granola, peanut butter drizzle

Solo: I only had a bit of this, but it was pretty good. Very peanut-buttery, and very chocolatey. It tasted a lot more like a protein smoothie than a traditional açai bowl, which I’m not mad at.

Ava: In spite of having grown up in Southern California, this, shockingly, was my first açai bowl. I liked it! I’m a bit of a peanut butter fiend so I appreciated the drizzle on the top, and the combination of the cold blended açai, crunchy granola, and soft banana slices was nice texture-wise. It was very sweet and definitely tasted more like a bowl of ice cream than a nutritious meal. The bowl was also pretty big, and filling (I only ate about half of it in one sitting). It tasted really lovely, but I’m sure there’s so much sugar in one of these bowls that it should be treated more like a dessert than a healthy food, which is how Playa Bowls seems to be trying to bill their bowls. It was still absolutely delicious, and I’m tempted to try making one of these myself at home this summer with açai, granola, and peanut butter to try to control the amount of sugar that goes into it.

“Dragonberry” Pitaya Bowl

• Blended: pitaya (aka dragonfruit)
• Topped with: granola, strawberry, blueberry, honey

Solo: This one’s texture is a little different from the açai. It’s more like a watery-slushy kind of deal, which I honestly like more. It’s also hot neon pink which is fun. Also, it came topped with like, an absurd amount of fruit. Unfortunately, I didn’t end up finishing mine for a few reasons, mostly because it was super super sweet. I like sweet things, and I like fruit, but eating this felt a lot more like eating a huge bowl of ice cream than the health food it’s marketed as. Upon some internet searching, we discovered that this specific bowl has over 80g of sugar. Given that the American Heart Association’s recommended daily intake is 25g… aaaa! No wonder this tasted sweet. Overall though, this was a little disappointing. For the price, it wasn’t amazing flavor-wise, and the huge amount of sugar definitely put a damper on my enjoyment of it.

Ava: I only had a bit of this, but I thought it was good! Definitely sweeter than the açai bowl, and I preferred the Power Bowl’s slightly less sweet (albeit still pretty sugary) taste. I’ve never had dragonfruit by itself so I’m not sure how closely the pitaya compares to the taste, but this bowl looked really lovely with the bright pink color and all the different fruit on top.

Conclusions

The Good: The two bowls tasted absolutely lovely, and Playa Bowls’s fruity, summery, happy vibes are exactly what I (Ava) needed a hit of before heading into final papers and exams. All the ingredients seemed to be fresh and high quality, and the menu has so many options for açai bowls, pitaya bowls, and smoothies that you will never run out of new things to try for a warm-weather pick-me-up. The staff was really lovely and helpful and the service was super quick, and the cute little shop itself, full of students sitting at tables enjoying their bowls, would be a nice place to bring a friend or a date or bring your laptop and get some work done.

The Bad: Definitely not super nutritious, despite all the fruit and everything that Playa Bowls says on their website about the health value of pitaya and açai. Also fairly expensive, but would be nice as a once-in-a-while treat if we’re thinking about one of these bowls as dessert as opposed to a meal. I (Solo) went to (and reviewed) Loco Coco earlier this year, and not that it’s a competition, but if you want expensive blended fruit on campus, that is definitely the way to go in my opinion.

All images via Solo and Ava