Down on Church Street below Chapel, Bora Bora bills itself as a “smoothie cafe.” I’d say it’s more of a dessert bar, starting with drinkable color-blasted “signatures” full of candies, syrups and ice creams and garnished, Instagrammably, with whole popsicles, dipped sugar cones and, okay, fresh fruit. There are more signatures than smoothies, actually, and even in the maximalist menu’s “food” section, sweet dwarfs savory.
The proportion is even more lopsided if you count as food the “açai” category, where, among a range of both açai and non-açai smoothie bowls, I mistook a large Tropical Bowl ($14.49) for something I would actually feel healthy eating. Arrayed over the top like stripes on a flag, rows of fresh mango, banana and blueberry should have helped. Instead, the mango and banana were starchy and underripe, while most of the blueberries, some still possessing their little unpalatable stems, were squishy and past their time.
Beneath the disappointing fruit, an absurdly stingy layer of granola—toasted oats, coconut, pepitas, pecans, almonds and maybe peanuts—was pretty tasty, I’ll admit, as was an absurdly unstingy base of frozen crème de coco. I couldn’t help enjoying those last two layers, especially together. But I also felt they were overly sweetened, as superfood bowls implicitly aren’t, and that, anyway, the bowl still wasn’t remotely worth the price I’d paid.
The dish did however teach me to think of Bora Bora as a dessert place, which led to a better time. Embracing high-key sugar and unnatural flavor and artificial color, I went with the Rainbow Rocket ($6.99), a parfait-ish pile of fluorescent mango, strawberry and blue raspberry slushies. Each flavor was candy-sweet and clearly identifiable on taste alone, with the mango perhaps the most like the actual fruit.
Unlike the menu image, which features a multicolored popsicle matching the colors in the cup, my order came with an atomic green lime pop sticking stick-up from the slush, a deviation which, on second thought, I totally appreciated. I’d chosen the Rocket to recapture my ’90s-kid feeling of eating blue and red snow cones and red-white-and-blue rocket pops straight from the truck, and the three-layer slushie met that mission all on its own. So the lime pop, which had some other flavor I couldn’t quite place—maybe kiwi, though that might’ve just been the color talking—got to be its own nostalgia vector, reminding me of Ninja Turtles ooze and Double Dare slime. By the time I was done, my tongue was numb, my lips were sticky and my nostalgic urge was satisfied, even if, as an adult, I was much more conscious of the spectacular profit margin on syrup-flavored ice.
If healthy smoothies and smoothie bowls are what you’re after, I can’t, from my experience, recommend Bora Bora. If sugary pleasure—guilty, nostalgic or otherwise—is what you treasure, it’s a good bet that something on Bora Bora’s menu, from dressed-up slushies to candy-inspired milkshakes to drizzled waffles and crepes, will mark the spot like a proverbial X.
Written and photographed by Dan Mims.
