Brookline has another healthy eating option in the newly opened Life Alive café on Commonwealth Avenue. The ample, beautifully designed space offers free WiFi, breakfast, lunch, and dinner and a variety of coffee and wellness beverages. They also provide an online ordering and takeout option. The Brookline café joins Live Alive’s Massachusetts roster next to other locations in Cambridge, Lowell, and Salem.
“The students and young, educated people looking for healthy alternatives who live around Boston University are Life Alive’s target audience,” says Life Alive partner Ron Shaich. “We jumped at the opportunity to satisfy this area’s need for more nourishing alternatives.”
Life Alive’s menu is designed to merge healthy, plant-forward foods with satisfying flavors. “There should never be a compromise between eating healthy and eating what you crave,” says Shaich. The menu centers on bowl meals with a base of grains, greens, or broth. The Blonde Miso Ramen bowl mixes miso broth, ramen noodles, shiitake, chickpeas, pickled jalapenos, kale, tomato, a soft egg, and chili oil for a warm, comforting meal perfect for chilly fall days. Customers can also grab quick snacks like street corn with cashew aioli and harissa yeast, or satisfy sweet cravings with a Nitro Float starring vegan coconut gelato, nitro coffee, and cacao nibs.
The menu isn’t the only healthy part of Life Alive; sustainability is an essential component of their business. They buy organic ingredients and emphasize local growers. The plant-heavy menu also helps reduce the greenhouse gasses caused by meat production. “We aren’t a ‘vegan’ restaurant, and we’re not ideological about animal proteins, but we also think we get enough of it in our diets, and people don’t seem to miss if it’s not in every meal,” says Shaich. In this way Life Alive provides vegan and vegetarian options without the moral pressures of other healthy eating facilities.
The café also promotes local sustainability by working with Massachusetts farmers. They purchase beets and carrots from Michael Doctor of Winter Moon Roots in Hadley, MA, and wheatgrass from another local producer. The menu changes seasonally depending on available produce so that diners can expect new dishes regularly.
“We work hard to make each Life Alive a place to build community. One way we do this is by offering a range of symposiums and events on topics like nutrition, wellness, the arts, civics, food, and sustainability,” says Shaich. These events can be found in Live Alive’s online calendar. “Life Alive Brookline is the soil where community members gather, and we like to throw in some conversational “seeds” to see what sprouts.”
