Natural Eats is a small café located on the 3rd floor of the Racecourse Shopping Complex, Colombo 7, along with the Fitness Collections gym. It focuses on catering to healthy and sustainable lifestyles. The café’s vision is to provide healthy food that is inspired by the taste and texture of unhealthy yet appetizing junk food, offering replacements for cheesecake, chocolate, and cookie dough to create tasty dishes that can be enjoyed without worrying about negative consequences. Natural Eats started out as a health food stall at the Good Market on Saturdays, where they sold their signature peanut and pistachio balls. The food products are made from healthy ingredients such as granola, pomegranate jam, coconut paste, and walnuts. After a successful run at the Good Market, the café now has its own permanent location and a menu that includes healthy sandwiches and breakfast bowls, and then offer lunch and dinner service as well.
The café is run by the entrepreneurs Rushini Goonathilake and Dilshan Basnayake. Rushini, who is a strict vegetarian herself, found the eateries of Colombo lacking in healthy vegetarian options; so she decided, along with her partner, to open their own establishment and contribute to the ever growing colorful spread of restaurants on the streets of Colombo. They are completely transparent about the ingredients they use for their products and provide the number of calories, percentage of good fat, carbohydrates, and protein content of all items in their menu.
Natural Eats is driven by their vision to make healthy and delicious food affordable to all Sri Lankans, so all their menu items are priced well below Rs.600.
A large portion of the Natural Eats menu consists of vegan and vegetarian items along with a few dairy free drinks, such as the Berry Burst (strawberry, blueberry), Coco Loco (coconut water, passion fruit), and Electrolite Me (coconut water, lime, mint).
Natural Eats’ signature vegetarian sandwich is a delicious combination of tofu, hummus, onion chutney, and an in-house pomegranate jam in which everything is made from scratch; it is priced at Rs.450.
Their vegan menu also includes snacks and spreads such as the Cocogranate (granola, coconut paste, and pomegranate jam) the Banoffee balls, and the Peanut & Kaya (peanut, vegan coconut jam, and desiccated coconut).
In addition to the Racecourse location, Natural Eats can be found every Saturday at the Good Market and has opened a second café at Ceylon CrossFit located at Sir James Peiris Mawatha, near Nawaloka Hospital. The café recommends that you pre-order the energy balls and bars in order for them to be able to cook up a fresh batch for you.
