It seems that any place that offers healthy food will have bowls on the menu. But what makes one bowl stand out among all the others?

To pare down the choices for this battle of the bowls, I chose restaurants with multiple locations — Active Culture, Mother’s Cafe, Laughing Planet and Cafe Yumm. Each offers a variety of bowls with a selection of vegetables, unique sauces and optional protein, served over rice or quinoa.

Active Culture came to Bend in Fall 2018 from Southern California. It calls itself fine dining. But this is not the white-linen-tablecloth type of fine dining, as it has long communal tables, a refrigerator filled with drinks and a kids’ play area. However, this is fine dining in the sense that Active Culture uses the highest quality ingredients: ripe, fresh and combined in creative ways where each ingredient stands out individually yet works to enhance the flavor of the whole dish.

Diners order at the counter. There are six different bowls on the menu, mostly vegetarian. Prosciutto is the only meat offered; it is part of the Bend Rice Bowl that I tried on my visit. Salty prosciutto and mild goat’s milk cheese are complemented by sour Granny Smith apple bites and chopped rich, sweet dates. Fresh, tasty tomatoes, red pepper and sweet red onions complete the bowl.

The light lemon vinaigrette dressing faded into the background, allowing the fresh ingredients to dance together without overpowering the other flavors. I ordered a side of the Organic Goodness (OG) sauce. Almonds gave a creaminess to the sunflower oil and lemon base.

My dining companion ordered the Eastern Trade Winds bowl that had a lighter organic quinoa base compared to the dense brown rice of the Bend Rice bowl. It was a bit more salad-like, with kale, garbanzo beans, cucumber and red onions. Peanuts, walnuts and dates added sweet and salty dimensions. A creamy Slamming Sauce, made with Greek yogurt, topped the bowl and pulled all the incredibly fresh ingredients together.

Likewise, Mother’s Eastside had a way of mixing flavors that surprisingly played off each other perfectly. The Ithaca bowl included moist, perfectly cooked chicken in a subtle pesto sauce. It played against fresh, crispy snap peas that were split to reveal their little pea prizes. Fresh garbanzo beans, crunchy cubed cucumbers, sweet grape tomatoes and Kalamata olives were topped with creamy red-pepper hummus. The hummus flavors vary as the cook preparing the dish may choose garlic, plain or black-bean hummus instead.

The other bowl I chose was a heartier vegan bowl that was more suitable for a cold fall afternoon. The Bali Bowl is a squash curry that was filled with delicata squash and other vegetables. My only complaint was that the broccoli florets were slightly overcooked and large.

Both of the Mother’s bowls were so full of good, healthy ingredients, I had to dig to get down to the rice. The Eastside restaurant offers three savory bowls on the menu — the Ithaca, Bali and Buddha. The downtown location adds a Bonsai bowl with seared tuna, a Seoul bowl with beef bulgogi and vegan kimchi, plus Renee’s Roasted Chicken bowl with a base of creamy polenta. Note that the Westside location doesn’t have a full kitchen and doesn’t offer savory bowls.

Laughing Planet is a Portland-based, Northwest chain with restaurants in five cities. It claims to be “your friendly neighborhood eatery with a global vision” and prides itself on being farm-to-table. Of the restaurants I visited, our Bend outpost offers the largest number of bowls: nine of them. Each bowl can be ordered with brown or jasmine rice, or sauteed kale (for $2.50 more).

I chose their best seller, the Thai Bowl over brown rice. It included baked tofu, garlic green beans and perfectly steamed, bright green broccoli topped with Thai lemongrass peanut sauce. I also tried a Bollywood Bowl. The grilled chicken breast was a tad dry so in the future, I would ask for extra Southern Indian Coconut sauce on the side. Curry-roasted chickpeas, garlic green beans, spinach and yams rounded out the flavors.

Ubiquitous in the Northwest, Cafe Yumm is all about the Yumm sauce. The Original dressing is vegan, made up of chickpeas, silken tofu, almonds, coconut milk and curry powder. It has bit of a lemony bite to it. Roasted garlic and chipotle flavored Yumm sauce are also available.

An original Yumm bowl is brown rice covered with black beans, olives, shredded cheese, cilantro, avocado, diced tomatoes, salsa and sour cream. Other bowls on the menu add different ingredients.

The Smoky adds Chipotle Chili to the original bowl for a winter warmer. The Chilean Zucchini bowl adds a zucchini-corn-tomato stew for a few more veggies. While I do love the Yumm bowls, the tomatoes are sometimes hard or over-ripe and the olives are canned and chopped.

Wherever you find a bowl, look for fresh ingredients in unique combinations. It’s a healthy fast-food alternative to a burger and fries.