An Unexpected Sunny Spot at a Houston Deli & Health Store

While it doesn’t look like much, the Sunshine Vegetarian Deli & Health Food Store packs some pleasant surprises. The outside looks like a standalone corner store–but the parking lot is suspiciously full. A cheery sign flashes open! O-P-E-N! Posters abound around the tinted glass front doors that, at first glance, look generic—until you read them. Own A Juicer?

The inside harbors shelves upon shelves of stuff you didn’t know you wanted. Flavored licorice sticks? And I don’t mean the candy. I didn’t even know these gems pictured below existed. There were jars of juice, rows and rows of vitamins of every variety: even holistic junk food.

While the Sunshine Deli blends juices and smoothies in-store for your beverage pleasure, the piece de resistance is the food. This all-purpose health food corner store with unbeatable prices isn’t only a vendor of healthful provisions: it’s also a restaurant with an all-vegetarian menu, tons of vegan options and daily specials.

Everything is a take on classic American cuisines—upgraded in its own special way. It sounds like a joke, but I assure you it’s worth a try. I tried two of the burgers and a wrap, the potato salad and the garlic kale and the hummus.

The garlic kale had a natural garlic spice kick, as did the potato salad but from something slightly different that I couldn’t place. The burgers were delicious and wildly different from each other (a black bean and a Texas burger). It’s easy to make a sub-par vegetarian burger that tastes like fried beans smeared on bread with condiments, but I marveled at not just how well they compared to real burgers, but how well they stood alone from the comparison.

The décor left something to be desired if the truth be told, but it wouldn’t be a diamond in the rough without a little rough. Overall Sunshine Vegetarian Deli & Health Food Store has something of a spell cast over it—your eyes will pass right over it if you’re not looking. It’s camouflaged as ordinary but the concept is anything but. Head on over to 4915 Martin Luther King Jr Blvd. and let us know what you think!