Raw Food Restaurant Favorites!We spent quite a bit of time on the raw food restaurant scene during our August 2009 trip to the USA. Our favorite was probably Quintessence in New York's East Village. It is a tiny, quaint, gorgeous place that serves some fabulous creations. Have a look at these pictures! The picture below is spinach and onion ravioli with pesto sauce. It was very good. Served as an appetizer. 
Nori Rolls. These were packed with veggies and a nut cheese I think. Very tasty and filling. Served as an entree, a bit on the expensive side in my view. 
This was a mock tuna wrap. Served as an appetizer, I thought it was ridiculously overpriced at ten dollars. I mean, it was tiny! 
This mini pizza was delicious! Very, very small though. 
This was great! Hugely, and I do mean HUGELY, filling! This Mexican platter is so amazingly clever! The taco has various raw ingredients designed to taste EXACTLY like refried beans, mayonnaise, cheese, etc in a crispy taco! It was amazing! The burrito had the same filling as the taco. Definitely worth it! 
The Indian Platter. Enormously tasty, but not very filling for a main course. 
This was butternut garlic bread. It was good, but tasted very sweet, so it was more like cake than bread. 
This was very good, more like a bread than the one above. Great with guacamole. 
One of the best desserts on offer, in my view. The pecan pie. Served with raw cherry ice cream and raw vanilla ice cream. 
The dessert platter. A small taste of all the most popular desserts. The pecan pie and the tiramisu are the best ones.
I don't have a picture, but I would not recommend the raw pizza from Quintessence, it is NOT a pizza. I don't know how they can call it that. It is expensive ($15) and all it is is a SLIVER of something they call a pizza. Beyond tiny, I almost couldn't find it on my plate. Other raw restaurants we enjoyed were Raw Soul and Bonobos. Raw Soul is in Harlem and has a GREAT pizza, which is really like a real pizza. We tried their platter which is half a pizza, half a burger and half a mock tuna wrap. 
This muffin from Raw Soul was also extremely good. Just a bit on the heavy side though, more like a meal on its own. 
Bonobos raw food restaurant is more like a takeout. You order from the counter and then take your tray and go and eat. They invite you to taste everything and have some really nice plain fruit ice creams. We had some nori rolls which had nut meat and vegetables inside, and a cabbage burger, also with nut meat inside.
New York's raw food restaurant scene is great! There are also so many raw products in the supermarkets/health food stores, that you feel like a kid in a candy store, literally. Surrounded by raw chocolate, raw cookies, raw crackers, chocolate butters and raw ice cream, it is like a dream come true Except, maybe not so much. I have nothing but appreciation for the wonderful care and love that goes into these raw creations, and I so appreciate all vegan and raw vegan products that are available and every raw food restaurant as they all show people who are just switching over from a standard diet, or those who are just experimenting, that they don't need to sacrifice taste, in fact it is just the opposite and this stuff is tastier! However, gourmet raw restaurants food is great for occasional consumption, but it is a little too rich and high fat to be eaten too often. However, as you can see from these pictures, we ate at these raw restaurants quite A LOT! Here's some of the products we found in the shops! Most of it I didn't buy, I just photographed in the store. 
A whole shelf dedicated to raw vegan goodies! 
If you had to live off of this prepackaged version of 'raw' food, you would not be very healthy! As an odd snack, sure, it's great. And if you look at my
Dessert Recipes Page
you'll know that I sometimes make rich desserts, but you just can't eat like this all the time and feel good. I guess it's really just common sense, and we all actually know this. THIS is REAL raw food! 
If you're already on a good diet and have been for a while, prepackaged raw cookies and cakes act like junk food in your system. As Doug Graham says: "If it looks like pizza and tastes like pizza, chances are it's going to digest like pizza" For the month that we were in the States, we still ate our usual high fruit diet, and we LOVED the delicious fruits we were getting there, particularly the watermelons and the mangoes, but we coupled that with far too many high fat gourmet raw items and after a month of it, let's just say plump and pimply would be a kind thing to say. High fruit and high fat do not mix well! And high fat just aint healthy! I also had my worst experience with endometriosis while there, after a few weeks of high fat raw, which I can attribute to my diet while I was there. Nevertheless, I don't regret it for an instant! It was (mostly) a LOT of fun, and I enjoyed everything I ate. I wanted to experience the raw food restaurant scene, and I sure did! If I lived in New York, I would definitely eat at raw food restaurants occasionally, and they DO have wonderful low fat options on their menus as well. Wonderful salads and smoothies. However, I just didn't choose these options from their menus, I just WANTED to taste all the decadent high fat fare. How lovely to have a place to meet friends and for them to be able to order food that suits their taste at the same time as we have food to suit our tastes. In Las Vegas, we had a melon mono meal at the buffet! 
We found that the more high fat gourmet foods we ate at a raw food restaurant, the less fruit we COULD eat. When your system is all clogged up with fat, you can't really digest your fruit all that well! So you eat less fruit, which then starves your body of carbs (which every cell of your body runs on), which creates massive cravings, so you go and eat more gourmet food. We didn't eat gourmet food every day, we would eat fruit and greens and salads for a few days and then go and eat some gourmet food. But fat stays in your system for quite a while, so by the way you feel, you might as well be eating it every day. It's also a very short step from gourmet raw to cooked food! The gourmet food is flavored with all the same spices and stimulates your cravings for cooked foods. So it wasn't too long before we hit up the vegan restaurants for some vegan sushi and tofu skewers. Anyway, I loved the experience, I loved all the food. I am so glad to have had the opportunity to experience a raw food restaurant. And if you were on a low fat raw vegan diet, but had a raw gourmet meal from a raw food restaurant once a month or so, you would be super healthy! It's not what you do OCCASIONALLY that counts, it's what you do DAILY! However, when I next have the opportunity of visiting a raw food restaurant, it might be a good idea to order more carefully and not choose the most high fat options on the menu! However, I can't promise I'll do this! Especially not if it just looks too yummy!
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