The best new thing I have noticed about Melbourne are the Boost juice bars. I am sure these aren't a new phenomenon, but I didn't really appreciate them last year.
Essentially they are just little take-away shops that make extremely delicious and healthy smoothies, but it is also quite a spectacle as you get to see a team of four or five people making the smoothies as you wait.
The shops are incredibly popular and so the bloke at the front has four food mixes which he whizzes into action like a man spinning plates. Behind him other young people prepare ingredients, load the ingredients and ice into a mixer jug, or wash up the spent jugs. When you consider all the people who go into making just one drink it is extremely good value at around 5 dollars (under two pounds)
It is hard for me to capture the mood and the colours (remember I am from Somerset and thus possibly overly impressed by such things) in a brief entry, but suffice to say the shops are well worth a visit and the smoothies themselves are just brilliant.
Someone please bring this to the UK. There may be less call for such cold drinks in our climate, but they'd still do really well. If only because I would be in there all the time, looking at the whizzing shakes.
