Grezzo Restaurant
Raw power
By: ROBERT NADEAU
3/19/2008 3:54:40 PM
 RICH BROWNIE SUNDAE: The brownie, based on Brazil nuts, served with housemade gelati. |
| Grezzo Restaurant | 69 Prince Street, Boston | Open Wed–Sun, 5–11 pm | AE, DI, MC, VI | Organic wine | No valet parking | Access up two steps from sidewalk level | 857.362.7288 |
Grezzo, which means “raw” in Italian, is an upscale vegan restaurant specializing in “raw and living food.” No heat above 112 degrees is permitted, so the only cooking appliance is a dehydrator. Cold is allowed, so there’s gelato. But since there’s no dairy, the ice cream and cold sauces are made from nut milk. The menu is also pretty much devoid of gluten. The compensation for all of these limitations is the ingenuity of chef Alissa Cohen, who’s been eating this way for more than 20 years, plus an enormous variety of top-of-the-line vegetable ingredients.There’s also a reusable, recyclable, hemp-fiber bushel bag of hype. On alissacohen.com, it’s not just a restaurant — it’s a book, a DVD, lessons, supplements, and before-and-after weight-loss photos. This diet, it’s claimed, relieves 24 medical and psychiatric complaints, from diabetes to cancer.
So how’s the food? In March, when local greenhouses are straining for enough light to grow greens, no less? Well, fabulous — but perhaps more interesting than soul-satisfying. There are certainly some things here that other chefs are going to steal. For example, if you dehydrate thin slices of beets and squash, not only are they edible, slightly sweet, and a teeny bit like pasta in texture, but all the colors are preserved. So the Chioggia beet slices have all the beautiful red and white stripes, and a golden beet is the color of corn. I will be very surprised if this doesn’t show up in all the fancy bistros. (I’m going to try it at home.)
Grezzo looks like any tiny North End trattoria. The walls are cranberry-salmon, and there are oil paintings of vegetables. There is a little bar. Tabletops are copper. There are a lot of candles, apparently not raw but possibly organic. The servers, clad in black, are slim and lively. The chef-owner, in street clothes, is present but not hovering.
At the table, there’s no breadbasket. (No baking equals no bread.) Already one wonders, why are we in the North End? Would we like a drink before dinner? That could be the featured Grezzo mojito ($6) or cucumber martini ($7). The mojito is a pretty good no-alcohol fake of a mint-lime drink. The martini has some kombucha (fermented sweet tea) for fizz and a bit of alcohol, but lacks the resinous, herbal flavors of a classic martini. It tastes like cucumber.
One successful appetizer is “maroon carrot bisque” ($8). These purple carrots purée into a tasty cold soup, and the garnish of razor-thin unusual carrot slices, some crisp pear, and onion is a nice texture contrast. Gnocchi carbonara ($11), on the other hand, is deep in the genre of faux food, since the kitchen can’t poach dumplings, use bacon or eggs, or even liquid-smoke seasoning (which is made by burning wood). So what we have are nut balls in a nut-cream sauce, and it tastes more like halvah than pasta. What excited me on this plate was the garnish of raw green peas and micro-green pea shoots.
An entrée of winter-vegetable lasagna ($22) is in the same zone. There’s no pasta, no cheese, and no cooked-down tomato sauce, so the dish looks and tastes more like salad than lasagna. The tomato sauce is a few dabs of chopped stuff, while the “béchamel” sauce mentioned on the menu is another nut cream, and not much of it. What stood out was the spectacular variety of greens and edible flowers, plus sliced and sometimes dehydrated vegetables. This is certainly great eating — once you get the idea of lasagna out of your head.
Massaman coconut curry ($21) lacks heat, but there’s also no coconut milk. Again, one thinks of stew but crunches along on salad. The nut cream has some curry flavor, but the lasting positive impressions are of shredded snow peas, shredded coconut, a variety of sprouts and micro-greens, and the intriguing vegetable vermicelli, which are long and stringy but aren’t pasta and don’t look like spaghetti squash. What are they?
Wines are available but not featured. A glass of organic zinfandel ($9) was rather good. My guess would be that raw-food promoters are not terribly interested in wine (and beer has to be cooked in the brewing process). But there’s a parallel movement in the wine world called biodynamic winemaking, which fosters wild yeasts and has produced some impressive and unusual flavors in French wines.
Dessert is the easiest course in this cuisine. Chef Cohen has a picture on her Web site of faux cannoli and such, but the faux dessert our night was “sinfully delicious cheesecake” ($11) — and it rather was. No actual cheese, of course, but the combination of ground nuts and bananas was pretty rich and delicious, and the nut crust underneath was better than the cookie-crumb crusts of most commercial cheesecakes. An agave sauce with some berries and kiwi didn’t provide the sweet contrast you’d get with “real” cheesecake, but it was tasty. A “rich brownie sundae” ($11) was a slam dunk. It came with housemade vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry gelato; chocolate sauce that was somehow melted; and a “brownie” that was crumbly and based on Brazil nuts, but rather like a brownie, with that irreplaceable chocolate flavor.
The short menu changes weekly and offers a “chef’s tasting” ($59). I think the former is a good idea, but the latter might not be, since the best effects of this cuisine are not cumulative. Cohen is putting so much on each platter that her best weapon — obscure varieties of vegetables, herbs, and greens — can be dulled by overuse. Her real goal is to make this a diet for life, so I think in the long run her efforts are better aimed at cold soups and salads rather than faux Italian or Thai food. It will be interesting to see what she serves on a planned brunch menu.
One meal is not a diet for life, so I didn’t expect to feel more energized and lucid, nor did my aches and pains melt away. I was, in fact, on the way to a Celtics game, and considered balancing my Grezzo meal with a kosher hot dog. But I didn’t really need it, and didn’t have it.Robert Nadeau can be reached at RobtNadeau@aol.com .
Reference: http://thephoenix.com/printerfriendlyB.aspx?id=58334
Filed under: Raw Reviews
Sluggish, depressed, grieving the untimely death of a sister, Heather Bishop finally gave in to her other sister, Dawn Bishop, to bust out of the doldrums by doing something new.
Or more to the point, un-doing something old.
Heather, a committed vegan, stopped cooking and switched to eating only raw food.
“I promised my sister I would do it for three days only,” said Heather, who runs Bishop’s Bail Bonds with her father, Holly Bishop. But three days was all it took to hook the Longview woman on a diet even more stringent than veganism.
“I felt so different,” she said. “I had more energy and focus; I didn’t need as much sleep.”
In four months, Heather has lost 40 pounds and become a passionate proponent of the raw food diet. She spends hours learning recipes from dozens of cookbooks, goes to a weekly raw-diet group in Portland’s Pearl District, and will attend a world confab on raw food in Sedona, AZ in September.
Last week, Heather and Dawn served up a delicious lunch of raw dishes to several Daily News reporters, a photographer and Heather’s husband, cabinet maker Claude Ostgaard.
“I’m about 80 percent raw,” said Claude, who still craves an occasional pasta meal and “will never get rid of seafood, especially oysters.”
The lunch menu included tandoori balls, Thai wraps with sesame tahini dressing, nori rolls that looked and tasted like sushi, somosas with banana tamarind sauce, chips with a silky hummus dip, Tom Khai Soup, pad thai salad, and Heather’s original frozen dessert plus a rich layered sweet – something like cheesecake – in a raspberry sauce.
Don’t rush into the kitchen just yet.
Although some spices and condiments can be found locally, Heather orders a lot of ingredients at goldmine.com. Special equipment is required for preparing raw food that looks and tastes this good. And until the methods become second nature, it takes time to learn how to make a variety of dishes that will meet nutritional needs.
That said, every part of the lunch was beautiful, with bright flavors and pleasing textures.
Aside from an interesting take on sushi (her seaweed wraps around ground cauliflower rather than sticky rice), Heather tends not to focus too much on “fake” foodstuffs. Instead, she serves salads, appetizers, juices, smoothies and creamy, room-temperature soups.
The “pad Thai” salad that Heather makes with varying widths of shredded jicama, cabbage, mint and cilantro, was delicious tossed in a light sauce of liquefied almonds and tamarind (a tropical fruit).
She made the tandoori balls with pulverized almonds, onions, red peppers and curry sauce, with just the right balance of these flavors. Tandoori refers to a combination of spices including garlic, cumin, cayenne, ginger and garam masala.
Strong seasonings help pump up the flavors of raw foods. A staple condiment, for instance, is nama shoyu, an organic, unpasteurized soy sauce that is aged for four years.
That said, it takes practice to get Eastern food right, and Heather draws inspiration from more than 20 cookbooks and experiments the way any chef would.
“I love the process,” she said. “I’m not grabbing a jar.”
Instead of turning on the oven, Heather relies on a slicer called a mandolin, a high-powered Vita-Mix blender (they start at $350), a food dehydrator and a Cuisinart food processor.
Gesturing at the granite-topped island and custom cabinets made by Claude, she added, “This kitchen does not go to waste.”
When Heather and Dawn’s sister, Darla Gettman, died last August of a massive heart attack at the age of 49, “it was a wake-up call,” Heather said. “I want to do what I can do to protect myself.”
The staples of the diet are nothing new: fresh vegetables and fruits, lots of avocados and spices, and pulverized cashews and almonds — which provide a meat-like bulk and a kind of “milk”.
Raw fooders hold a special reverence for cacao beans, which contain high levels of sulfur and magnesium and may increase focus, alertness and well-being, according to a Raw Cacao Web site.
Cacao beans that are certified organic and raw are dried at low temperature and are used in making smoothies, brownies, pies, and truffles. The beans can also be ground into a coarse powder and brewed like tea or used in coffee-like drinks.
An acquired taste, raw food lovers prefer it to processed chocolates.
As with many food regimes, the raw food diet is an alternative to an American diet of fatty, over-processed food, which raw food converts blame for obesity, low energy and all kinds of illness. Books, articles, Web sites and seminars promote raw food as a cure for sleep problems, addictions and terminal cancers.
Claims about the raw food diet include the belief that raw food is “alive,” and temperatures higher than 105 degrees kill healthy enzymes in fruits and vegetables. Advocates say they have more energy, lose weight easily and have revitalized skin.
Kaiser dietician Janice Stixrud said she can see many benefits in eating more fresh, raw fruit and vegetables.
“We’re always beating that drum,” Stixrud said. “That’s the food group that most people don’t get enough of.”
She has not done enough study of a totally raw diet to advocate it or caution against it, the dietician said, but she’d be concerned about people – especially pregnant women and children – getting the right balance of nutrients, including protein and calcium.
“Some vegetables offer better nutrition when they’re cooked,” Stixrud said. Cooked tomatoes, for instance, have more anti-oxidants than raw tomatoes, she said.
“Not being able to cook might make it hard for some to digest the food,” the dietician said. “I don’t think it would suit someone with irritable bowel syndrome.”
Stixrud suggested a good reference work for people considering strict new diets: “What to Eat,” by Marion Nestle.
“She stresses common sense, fresh food, how to pick food that’s healthy. She’s open minded, she doesn’t hype things and she tries to educate the consumer.”
Heather Bishop said anyone interested in trying a raw food diet should talk to their doctors. She and Dawn, granddaughters of a Longview butcher, said they try not to be rigid about the lifestyle.
When they’re invited to friends’ homes to eat, they choose salad, and Heather sometimes asks the host if she can bring a raw dish to share. “Heck, I’m going to go -it’s about friendship,” she said. “I don’t want eating to inhibit my social life.”
Families can be a whole other challenge. Dawn said, laughing about how her kids call the raw food movement a “cult.” As she did with Heather, she urges her loved ones to try the diet because it’s healthy.
“What’s important?” Dawn said. “Rush, rush, rush, let’s get on the hamster cage? Or taking care of our families?”
Heather agreed. “A lot of people think this is extreme,” she said. “Dawn’s the one who told me, “Seeing all the processed food at the supermarket – that’s extreme.”
Reference: http://www.tdn.com/articles/2008/03/12/this_day/10141428.txt
Wednesday, March 12, 2008 6:35 AM PDT
By Cathy Zimmerman
Filed under: Raw Reviews
The raw food diet is one of the most influential diet trends around.
The name of the ‘raw food diet’ may seem self-explanatory; of course it is based on raw food. But there is so much more to it that you need to understand. When you do, you’ll see why this diet has acquired such a strong and loyal following.
Eating raw food is popular right now, but it’s hardly original. Our prehistoric ancestors knew all about it before they discovered fire. But we forgot it for a while until the early 1900s. That was when people like Herbert Shelton and Ann Wigmore began to be a bit more vocal about the benefits for people following a raw food diet.
Some of the stated benefits of the raw food diet, as argued Artturi Virtanen, are that when raw food is chewed enzymes are released in the body, which helps us to digest the food more fully. The recent popularity of the raw food diet can perhaps be laid at the door of the book, “The New Raw Energy” by Leslie Kenton. This trend has many Hollywood celebrity followers such as Demi Moore and Woody Harrelson.
But what do we mean by ‘raw food’? We don’t mean raw meat. Advocates of the raw food diet are vegetarians. The diet is comprised of raw nuts, seeds and sprouted seeds, fresh fruits and vegetables, freshly squeezed or juiced fruit and vegetable juices, purified water, unpasteurized dairy products and other unprocessed foods free from chemicals.
Usually, people on a raw food diet eat 75% raw food. The rest of the diet may be fruit and vegetables dried in a food dehydrator below 116 degrees Fahrenheit, the temperature at which a food dehydrator works.
The benefits of a raw food diet are: a lower risk of heart disease and diabetes, greater energy, glowing skin with fewer signs of ageing, fewer digestive complaints, more easily maintained weight loss and even healing of some illnesses and chronic health conditions.
It is recommended to follow a diet plan specifically designed by a doctor who is expert in the raw food diet so you can get all the vitamins and minerals you need. This is because, unless you know what you’re doing, it is quite difficult to get enough calcium and protein on the raw food diet.
The raw food diet isn’t for everyone, but if you’re still interested, now you know the basics, you may like to check it out with a doctor who has experience in this area, so they can help you put together a healthy eating raw food plan.
Reference: http://www.bestsyndication.com/?q=20080321_raw_food_diet.htm
A wonderful resource for information and events in the Washington area.
Seattle has been a little slow in the makings when it comes to Raw Vegan Food. However, as is common with anything in this city… given a little pep talk it usually comes around.
Be sure to check out Chaco Canyon when your in town. Not too Shabby.
