In her latest piece Los Angeles-based food writer Kerstin Kühn reviews Plant Food and Wine, a new upscale vegan restaurant that offers a different take on meatless dining.
In Los Angeles vegan restaurants are a bit like fish and chip shops in London: there are a lot of them but really good ones are few and far between. They’re usually all about kale salad, raw juices and meat substitutes like tempeh, seitan or tofu. As a non-veggie, quite frankly, I’d rather eat the real thing so vegan dining hasn’t played a major part in my culinary outings here. Until now.
Plant Food and Wine is an innovative vegan restaurant, which recently opened in Venice Beach. It’s the new flagship from celebrity chef Matthew Kenney, a raw food guru who has been a James Beard Award nominee and runs a number of restaurants in the USA, as well as a raw food culinary academy with outlets in California, Florida and Thailand.
The ethos at Plant Food and Wine is serving upscale vegan cuisine showcasing the best, seasonal produce from Southern California alongside a wine list of organic and biodynamic varietals.
Located at the far end of Abbot Kinney Boulevard, the “coolest block in the USA” according to
GQ Magazine, the restaurant embodies a sense of calm, although its sleek interior, with white walls, reclaimed stone and wooden floors, is a little bit sterile. But what the interior lacks in soul, the exterior makes up for in the form of an expansive patio. Complete with herb garden, olive trees and string lights it is just about one the loveliest outdoor dining spaces I’ve seen in LA.
Open for brunch, lunch and dinner everyday, the kitchen at Plant Food and Wine is headed up by Scott Winegard, whose team creates a market-driven menu that flows with the seasons. While a nine-course tasting menu is available at $75 a head, the main menu is divided into snacks, cheese, sharing plates, main courses and desserts. That said, all of it lends itself to sharing, so when I dined at Plant Food and Wine with two girlfriends, we ordered a bunch of different dishes for the table.
The first thing that came out from the snacks section was a mushroom pâté served with pickles, mustard and sour dough toast. Made from “any old mushrooms we have in the kitchen” according to Winegard, they’re blitzed in a high-speed blender along with walnuts and seasoning and then set with agar. The result is a firm yet smooth pâté with a seriously moreish earthy flavour.
Right now at the height of the California summer, tomatoes are at their very best – lusciously sweet and juicy – and at Plant Food and Wine they are served in a panzanella salad. Heirloom tomatoes are tossed with bread, torn shiso and basil leaves and a vinaigrette with a hint of horseradish. It’s a dish so simple yet so divine with the tomatoes so full of life, every mouthful reminds you why living in California is a food lover’s dream.
The same goes for avocados, which nowhere else in the world taste as good as in California. For years I paid a fortune for the perfectly ripe avocados from Waitrose but they were never perfect and very rarely ripe. Here they’re both: soft, buttery, nutty and so tasty they deserve an entire dish dedicated to them. Like at Plant Food and Wine, where a whole avocado is dressed with lemon vinaigrette and green tahini and served with watermelon radish, sprouts and dehydrated black olives. Again the
