My new favorite restaurant: Lemonade

Ladies and gentlemen, I recently happened upon the most amazing lemonade in the world. This is exciting news for people such as myself who, for example, recently had a spike in serotonin levels upon learning of Panera Bread's new frozen version of their famously tasty lemonade. The good news is that this vendor of the aforementioned citrus beverage also serves up really tasty food. The spot is the appropriately named Lemonade. I recently had a wonderful meal at their Venice location with my friend Canada.

The restaurant's concept is an upscale take on cafeteria-style dining. When you enter you are given a tray which you bring as you proceed through the line where people on the other side of the sneeze guard are ready to serve you. The first station is an array of cold salads, similar to the deli sides at M Cafe but there are twice as many options. You can choose from 1, 2, or 3 portions. Each portion is two scoops and you can have a scoop of two different items in that one portion if you so desire. Canada and I both opted for two portions with all different scoops. I was pleased to see that about 80% of the salads were vegan and the servers were all very knowledgeable about which contained animals products and which did not. After the salads, you encounter the sandwiches, the hot portions, the soups, and then the desserts. None of the sandwiches or the desserts are vegan, some of the soups and hot plates may have been but I was too busy staring at my colorful salad plate to notice.


At the cash register is a lemon-lover's wet dream: an array of more than five different lemonades. You can have samples of all of them and I highly suggest you do, although then you will end up like me: completely torn about which one too choose. I ended up going with peach ginger and Canada opted for blueberry mint. Both were completely out of this world. The were perfectly sweetened and the peach ginger had a delightful zing. Even if you ignore all the food, you must get your butt to Lemonade to try their signature drink.

My salad plate was made up of roasted beets with red onions and hazelnut vinaigrette, roasted cauliflower with golden raisins and a curry vinaigrette, sunchoke with fennel and mint vinaigrette, and French lentils. I gobbled all my portions up, enjoying every bite. They chefs did not skimp on the dill in the sunchoke salad which scores major points with me and the lentils were perfect--chewy, not mushy. I absolutely loved my meal.


I also had bites of Canada's quinoa, tomato and avocado, and farro salads. Again, all were wonderful. The tomato salad had big chunks of creamy avocado--it's a simple concept but made for an extremely refreshing dish.


With 3 locations around town (Venice, Downtown, and West Hollywood,) you have no excuse to not try this place out! Even if you don't try the food, the lemonade is worth a special trip.


Lemonade
3 L.A. locations
(Note: the website does not list the Venice location, but I promise, it exists)
1661 Abbot-Kinney Blvd.
Venice, CA 90291

Don't have a cow just yet about The Vegan Spot's closing!

Uh oh! I better get on to posting all my backed up restaurant reviews, recipes, etc. because now it looks like one of the downsides of getting behind on posting is that the restaurant I'm reviewing may close down before I get around to talking about it. Ooooops, this is what has happened with The Vegan Spot over here in Silver Lake. An off-shoot of everyone's favorite Flore which specialized in vegan versions of meaty classics has sadly shuttered its doors. But wipe those tears away my vegan friends! Yesterday, during an amazing breakfast at Flore with Kirby Von Scrumptious and others, I chatted up our waiter about the closing and he said that, despite rave reviews from the food blogging community, the place just didn't do that much business. (I find that very easy to believe because every time I went in there it was totally empty.) However, the owners are working on plans to turn the space into a vegan coffee shop complete with the much celebrated vegan twinkies and a smaller version of The Vegan Spot's sandwich selection. The waiter added that he has seen the plans for the redesign and was excited about how great the new interior will look. So while it is sad that the short-lived Vegan Spot is now gone, we can all look forward to a new vegan coffee joint which, as far as I know, cannot be found anywhere else in LA. proper. It always seemed a little strange to me to open a vegan restaurant a few blocks down from your other vegan restaurant anyway.

So just as Quarrygirl has reminisced about the Vegan Spot on her latest blog post, I would like to take a brief stroll down memory lane and remember a lunch I had there a while back with my dear friend Craig.

Craig ordered the club sandwich. There he is, at top, showing his excitement over this juicy plate. Craig's club came with fake turkey, fake bacon, sprouts, tomato, avocado, and veganaise. The club is a staple of all vegan restaurants and it is pretty much impossible to make it taste anything but delicious. The Vegan Spot's version did not disappoint.

I ordered the Chef salad which came with fake chicken, fake bacon, and fake roast beef as well as some vegan mozzarella.
I am not the biggest fan of faux meats but the Vegan Spot's knock offs of animal goods were pretty outstanding. They were nothing like the spongy chunks you find at many Asian vegan places. Instead the chicken, turkey, and roast beef were very thinly sliced tasty treats! Note my adorable pup hanging out under our table.

The one thing Craig and I really didn't like about our meal was the water. At Flore they infuse the water with refreshing mint, but on our visit to The Vegan Spot the water was infused with rosemary. Our dishes were pretty savory and we would have loved to have been gulping water down but the rosemary flavored water was just gross. It kind of tasted like drinking dirt. Hopefully the new coffee shop will abandon this practice. I will probably be the first in line when it opens!

These October Days Really Rock my Socks Off!

Sunday was the perfect day for pumpkin picking: it was sunny but a little cooler than usual and it's early in the season which means the pumpkin selection is at its best. So Kirby Von Scrumptious and I, along with a couple other jokers, trucked down to Orange County to Tanaka Farms. When we got to Irvine, however, we were famished, so before we could play in the hay bales and get lost in the corn maze, off we were to one of the best vegan joints in SoCal: Veggie Grill.

Veggie Grill's concise menu is entirely vegan so there is no need to ask about which dishes contain what products, although I asked anyway because their dressings looked to0 thick and creamy to not be made with eggs. I have been dying to try the Baja Fiesta salad since drooling over a photo of it on another vegan blog (can't remember where exactly). Delightful is the exact word I would use to describe this mix of romaine, papaya, avocado, quinoa, roasted corn salsa, cucumber, cilantro, and tortilla strips. The ginger-papaya vinaigrette was perfectly light and tangy.

We got an order of Sweetheart fries for the table. They were delish but it's pretty difficult to make sweet potato fries that aren't. My sweet-potato-fry-heart will always belong to Pure Luck where they are actually baked, not fried, and are thick and super chewy and come with the world's best special sauce. But Veggie Grill's own special sauce--a tangy, vegan ranch-style dressing--was also very tasty and were great on the fries. I washed everything down with a combo of iced teas (black with sweetened peach for me, please!).

Everyone else also really enjoyed their meals. My meat-eating friend Derek even questioned whether the "chicken" was real or not--and everyone knows an omnivore being tricked by fake meat happens about as often as Sarah Palin kisses a polar bear.

I might not drive all the way down to Orange County just for Veggie Grill, but it is so good that I just might consider driving to the west side to the El Segundo location--which says a lot because y'all know how much I don't like going west of Vermont!

P.S. Look how cute we are in that picture at top. I <3 my fellow pumpkin-picking amigos!

"Meh" Cafe: fool me once, shame on you...

I was never too successful trying to get our little art department to go to M Cafe for lunch--not only does the macrobiotic cafe offer very few meat options (and only seafood at that) but the place is a tad outside of our usual budget and the portions are smallish. During our last week, our crew members slowly started dropping off until the last two working members in the art department were me and my coordinator. We took the opportunity to eat at the places that everyone else always scoffed at. So we found ourselves ordering one last time from M Cafe.

I ordered the Gado Gado salad which is described as "organic mixed greens, napa cabbage, crisp vegetables, golden tempeh triangles marinated with ginger, lemongrass & lime, frizzled onions & spicy peanut dressing." While that is basically an accurate description of the salad I got, I was still disappointed. The lamest thing about M Cafe is that over fifty percent of the items on the menu are prepackaged and sit in their display cases for who knows how long. This salad is no exception and it is just plain outrageous that M Cafe gets away with charging $12 for a teeny tiny salad that has been sitting out. If work hadn't been picking up the tab, I would have felt like a total sucker. I just kinda overlooked this lameness before, but I can't get over the fact that I would have been much better off grabbing a sesame tofu salad from Trader Joe's for three bucks.

We also ordered a couple chocolate truffles which were good but, again, were they worth $1.50 a pop? Not really.

I think the idea of M Cafe has been fooling me into thinking it's pretty good all this time. Maybe it's because I'm on hiatus now and I have to --gasp!!!--pay for my own food, but I won't be going back there anytime soon unless I have a hankering for being ripped off.


M Cafe de Chaya
9343 Culver Blvd.
Culver City, CA 90232
310.838.4300

Portobello Salad with Mustard Vinaigrette

Before seeing The Pineapple Express on Saturday, I threw together this lunch, inspired by Veganomicon's Portabello Salad with Spicy Mustard Dressing. I had to adjust the portions in the dressing quite a bit--those PPK gals can be so heavy-handed with oil! The salad was great. Wish I could say the same for the movie, but despite James Franco being a very sexy stoner, The Pineapple Express was exquisitely bad. Can't win 'em all I s'pose.

Roasted Portabello and Artichoke Hearts over Wilted Arugula with Mustard Vinaigrette

For the vinaigrette (modified from Veganomicon):
1/8 cup sweet hot smooth mustard
1 tbsp grapeseed oil
1/8 cup red wine vinegar
1/2 tsp maple syrup

Stir ingredients. Done!

For the salad:
2 Portabello caps
3-4 artichoke hearts (I use canned)
2 handfuls arugula
3/4 cup teriyaki sauce (I used Trader Joe's Island Soyaki which has pineapple juice in it. It's so good I could drink it like a cocktail.)

Marinate the portabellos in the teriyaki sauce for at least 20 minutes. Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. Cover with aluminum foil and bake for 30 minutes. Using tongs, turn caps over and bake ten more minutes. Meanwhile, push the arugula around a pan on medium-high heat for 3-5 minutes until wilted to your liking. Slice the cooled portobellos and assemble the salad with the artichoke hearts, arugula, and dressing.

"The Happy Vegan" Does Its Job

Truth be told, this week has not been the best. So when we went to Tender Greens this week, I splurged and ordered "The Happy Vegan" which just so happens to be the tastiest salad this side of the equator. Even thought we go to TG at least once a week, I rarely get The Happy Vegan because it's a bit of a calorie-fest, so I tend to opt for something lighter. But today I knew a big bowl of oil and carbs was exactly what I needed.

The salad is really five in one. There is a tangy tabbouleh, a vinegary mix of pasta pearls and corn, a garlic-cilantro hummus, a sweet blend of farro wheat and dried cranberries, and mixed greens with lemon vinaigrette, all served with a slice of crusty grilled French bread. I'd happily take just one of those salads as my lunch, but throw them all together and you get five times the happiness!!! Tender Greens obviously has a very astute and accurate menu-writing department. My Happy Vegan along with my cheer-up trip to Alvaro Street (more on that later) have helped make this week slightly less terrible, so big thanks to TG!!!

Tofu Salad from Metro Cafe: Really good but would be better in a compostable container

Behold this lovely salad that I devoured for lunch today. It comes to us from Metro Cafe which is yet another Culver City lunch spot with tasty sweet potato fries. When we ordered from Metro a few weeks ago, they accidentally forgot our SP fries and the owner drove them over to our stage. Yay, three cheers for Metro! But Metro uses all styrofoam take-out ware, so deduct those three cheers immediately.

This salad is tasty and super simple--just grilled tofu, orange segments, and walnuts with mixed greens and a homemade sesame-orange vinaigrette. It was the perfect light lunch--especially after having a soyrizo burrito for breakfast. But more on that later...


Metro Cafe
11188 Washington Pl.
Culver City, CA 90232

The Simplest Dish on the Planet: Summery Avocado Salad

Well, it didn't take us long to go back to Beacon after our fabu meal there last week. This time I got the avocado salad and miso soup. I had the avocado salad there before and make the same thing at home a lot--it's the kind of dish you feel a little dumb ordering because it's so simple you could whip it up yourself in 2 minutes, but whatever, it's free for me! Thanks, work!

The Beacon version uses Tokyo Negi (a kind of Japanese leek) and while it's good, the dish is just as good without it and really who wants to go to the trouble of tracking down Tokyo negi? Here is the way I make this simple salad at home:

Knock-off of Beacon's Avocado Salad
Ingredients:
1/2 avocado (pit removed)
1 bunch microgreens, washed and dried
1 tsp. sesame seeds
1 tsp. cilantro, chopped
1 tbsp. sesame oil
3 tbsp. rice wine vinegar


Directions:
Slice the avocado and arrange in a fan on the plate. Top with microgreens. Sprinkle plate with sesame seeds and cilantro.

Whisk rice wine vinegar and sesame oil together; drizzle over avocado.