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Mima’s
Juice Bar
153-33B Hillside Ave., Jamaica
718-206-0696
Cuisine:
Organic Juices
Hours:
9 a.m. to 8 p.m., Monday to Friday; noon to 8 p.m., Saturday; noon to
5 p.m., Sunday
As
soon as you visit Mima’s Juice Bar — a three-month-old establishment
on Hillside Avenue just off Parsons Boulevard — you start to feel a
change.
More
specifically, you feel healthy the second you step inside.
The
brand new bar — which has a tiny menu of wraps but focuses on healthy
juices and smoothies — is brightly lit, brightly painted in yellows,
greens and oranges and smells like a lemon orchard.
Owner
Mima, who goes by Patricia Grimsley in more formal circles, opened the
store after spending 26 years in corporate America and 30 years as a
health food aficionado-turned-guru.
All
of Mima’s vegetables and fruits are organically grown, with not a single
preservative or artificial additive to be found.
The meats in the chicken and tuna wraps are free of preservatives
and hormones.
Customers
have half a dozen milk choices, including non-dairy choices like soy, and
almost all of Mima’s drinks are fortified with vitamin and herbal
supplements.
The
result is a collection of incredibly fresh — and refreshing — choices
for the health-conscious.
And don’t let the healthy aspect of the place fool you —
everything is delicious.
Favorite
among kids are the bar’s frozen drinks, bright concoctions made with
watermelon and other juicy summer fruits.
There’s
a large tea menu, in which the drinks can be made either hot or cold.
Among
Mima’s most popular teas is the Immune Booster, which increases
circulation, reduces inflammation and clears the respiratory tract.
“A lot of come in here tired,” Grimsley said.
Energy-boosting
concoctions make up the bar’s most popular juices and smoothies
(basically juices mixed with milk and bananas), too.
One
of the most popular smoothies is the Stay Bizzy, a funky green drink made
with apple, banana, almonds, ginseng and spirulina, a member of the algae
family.
Another
popular drink is the immune-boosting Phyto-Man, another banana-and-almond
drink whose active ingredient is wheatgrass.
Wheatgrass
shots are also very popular.
People have them in the morning, Grimsley said, to get a potent
boost that’s much more effective and healthy than a cup of coffee.
Like all of Mima’s drinks, the wheatgrass shots are made fresh
before your eyes; Grimsley or one of her employees will grab a fistful of
wheatgrass and run it through a special juicer that extracts its liquid
goodness into a little cup.
The
flavor is potently grassy, but very sweet.
Customers not used to the taste are offered a pineapple chaser.
Priscilla
Carabello, who lives next door to the bar and visits every day, is a
diabetic who tries everything but especially likes the Innergizer.
Carabello
said that Grimsley and her store have educated her a lot about healthy
nutrition. It’s
no mistake according to Grimsley, who gives lectures on the topic at the
nearby Highland Church and has even used her kind of cooking to avoid
surgery.
She
reversed a condition that was going to send her to get a hysterectomy
after just two months of intensely healthy eating three years ago.
“If
I could do this with food for myself,” Grimsley said, “I wanted to
teach other people how to do this for themselves.”
As
she plans to expand the bar with more seating and more solid food choices,
Grimsley is also working on expanding her lectures into other area
churches and community forums.
But she’s not leaving Jamaica, she said.
“Everyone
walks in and says you should open this in Chelsea,” Grimsley said of the
trendy Manhattan neighborhood.
“But the people who need this most are here.”
—
Shams Tarek
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