a few weeks ago, sage was visiting here from the east coast and invited a bunch of us to have dinner. the place she wanted to go was called Cafe Gratitude. i knew nothing about the restaurant, but am always down to try a new place. when i arrived, during the million hour wait for a table, i scanned the menu and noticed that there wasn’t any meat being served. oh, one of those vegetarian places. the thing is, i actually have nothing against vegetarian restaurants. some of them are incredibly good, and also i totally respect what they are trying to do. i’m not a vegetarian myself, but i totally think that vegetaraians are doing the right thing.<\/p>\n
after reading the menu some more, we noticed that the place wasn’t only a vegetarian restaurant, but it was vegan. all the cheese was made out of nuts, the milkshakes were made out of “nut milk”, and there weren’t any eggs on the menu. doh! but, despite all of this, unlike some people, i still had hopes that the food would end up being pretty good. do you really *need* meat and dairy for food to be good? after we were finally seated, and the waitress told us that almost half of the items on the menu were unavailable, we scanned through the meager choices left over, and picked some food.<\/p>\n
it was only at this point that i realized the worst part about the food here: it was all uncooked. yes… RAW. for some bizarre reason, there are people out there who have the impression that cooking food is a bad thing and that all food should be served room temperature. ok, maybe there might actually be some scientific evidence to back this up… i dont know… and i really dont care, cause raw uncooked room temperature vegan food tastes like crap. how appealing does tepid soup sound? how about uncooked pizza? well, let me tell ya, it tastes even worse than it sounds.<\/p>\n
pretty much everything that i ate tasted horrible. everything was gritty, tasteless, and bland as hell. i think due to the lack of flavor, they tried to make up for it by adding as much texture as they could… everything was crunchy and crumbly, so you felt like you were chewing a rock slowly till it disintegrated into sand. basically, i felt like i was a little kid again, and for some bizarre reason had decided to eat everything i could find on the playground: there was gravel, there was tanbark, and there was grass. there were a couple good things (guacamole and an olive spread), but for the most part, the food was pretty lacking in… well, just about everything. on top of everything, they served us a bottle of wine that had gone sour, and then got all angry when we sent it back.<\/p>\n
the funny thing is that they told us that it takes an insane amount of work to make their food. apparently, the kitchen is open 24 hours a day so they can prepare the food. there are constantly people in the back milking nuts and making falafel balls out of sawdust and kitty litter. maybe if they bought an oven, they wouldnt have to spend so long getting the food ready and perhaps it might even end up tasting decent!<\/p>\n
*v<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
a few weeks ago, sage was visiting here from the east coast and invited a bunch of us to have dinner. the place she wanted to go was called Cafe Gratitude. i knew nothing about the restaurant, but am always down to try a new place. when i arrived, during the million hour wait for … Continue reading “Shouldn’t restaurants cook their food?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-718","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-san-francisco"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thisisvlad.com\/werd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/718","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thisisvlad.com\/werd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thisisvlad.com\/werd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thisisvlad.com\/werd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thisisvlad.com\/werd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=718"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.thisisvlad.com\/werd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/718\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thisisvlad.com\/werd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=718"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thisisvlad.com\/werd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=718"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thisisvlad.com\/werd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=718"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}