The Fresh Marketcafé coffee and smoothie bar in University of Oregon’s Global Scholars Hall is usually buzzing, and with good reason. The menu offers delicious drinks in a wide variety of flavors, from tart, fruity beverages to rich, peanut buttery concoctions. Located inside the Global Scholars Hall dorm, the drink bar is usually busy with kids ordering from the wide array of beverages and pastries. Though the menu itself has lots to offer, the constant buzz of rumors about a secret drink list were enough to prompt an investigation into the much talked about refreshments.
Photo by Briana Jones
To get the insider information about the secret menu, we went to Fresh employee Nathan Kamal Tripathy, or, as he goes by, Kamal. From the time he started working at Fresh when it opened two and a half years ago, Kamal has all the details on the drink selection and was cool enough to lay it all out in a quick Q&A.
Photo by Briana Jones
HL: “What’s the best thing on the menu in your opinion?”
KT: “I’m really partial, I mean half of them have coffee and coffee is amazing, so that’s not really a fair question, but I’m gonna say the Immunity is probably my favorite smoothie.”
HL: “Do you come up with recipes?”
KT: “We all do. We do everything from combining things in different ways to, like with our pumpkin spice latte, it was like ‘let’s puree pumpkin and make that into a drink.’ We definitely went above and beyond just pumping flavored sugar into a cup.”
Photo by Briana Jones
HL: “How long have you been interested in drink recipes?”
KT: “Honestly, I do what I do here mostly because I’m interested in people. One of my favorite parts of working in this part of Fresh, is that half of my job is interacting with people, helping them figuring out what drink would be perfect for them, seeing the look on their face when I gave them a drink they’ve never had before, or even just listening when they’ve had a rough day.”
HL: “What’s the weirdest drink anyone has ever ordered?”
KT: “The weirdest drink I’ve ever had someone order? Someone once asked, ‘Please pour me espresso shots until it fills up a whole cup.’ “
HL: “What about worst drink-wasters?”
KT: “Ohmygod, the worst drink disaster we have ever made… Someone wanted an Italian soda, and he wanted all of the flavors in the Italian soda, so he got a regular amount of syrup split among all the flavors. It tasted like peppermint cherry cough syrup.”
HL: “Okay, now the real question: what are a couple of your favorite things to drink that aren’t on the menu here?”
KT: “Oh mannnnn, there are so many good off-the-menu thing. I would say, probably, it’s a thing called the beta-mmunity. It’s just the fruit from the Immunity and the juices from the Beta put together. It’s really good. It came about because of people making mistakes while making the Beta. We make the Immunity more than anything else so sometimes you go on autopilot and use the Immunity fruit even though you’re making a Beta. You get the kefir and orange juice and good beta flavors with the tart fruits from the Immunity; it’s a good marriage.”
Photo by Briana Jones
KT: “I would also say, this time of year, getting lemon and ginger in tea with honey. Oh, and if you haven’t had the protein with chocolate, you need to do that. Or with strawberries… So good. Other things I recommend to people: the Refresh with mango instead of honeydew. We discovered that one this year, and it’s the way that smoothie is meant to be made but we just didn’t realize it when we created it.”
Photo by Briana Jones
Photo by Briana Jones
HL: “If you had to come up with a new smoothie and a name for it right now, what would it be?”
KT: “I want to cheat and give you something I’ve already done, but to come up with something right now, I want to do a tropical island smoothie with coconut milk, pineapple, that kind of mix of flavors. We try every year but we can never pull it off for some reason.”
Special thanks to Kamal and the entire staff of Fresh for making this article possible.
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