Two years ago, Roxanne Klein opened
a restaurant in Larkspur. This wouldn't have excited much comment, even with Chef Klein's multimillionaire husband Michael Klein footing the bill. But because Roxanne is a high-end restaurant serving vegan raw food, it caught the attention even of jaded Bay Area foodies.
The raw food movement's claims smack of pseudoscience, complete with vast lists of health benefits from allowing the food's "wild" enzymes to break down the food so your body doesn't have to. Whatever; how is the food? The novelty attracted lots of press, but writers also raved about their meals. I was never sure how much was hype and how much was truth (after all, The French Laundry is super-hyped and phenomenal). We decided to take our vegetarian friends Hans and Mark so we could all celebrate their wedding in February and the prestigious fellowship Mark won recently. Mark has dabbled some with raw food, and has been preparing dishes from the Raw (un)cookbook we gave them for Christmas.
Even with the advance research, none of us knew what to expect as we pulled up to the simple wooden structure. Would we be served plate after plate of crudités? How much variety would there be? Could there be, really? As we drove there we discussed the items that we wouldn't see. No bread. No dairy. No grains. No coffee. (though, see dessert) And of course, nothing cooked beyond 118° Fahrenheit.
We sat down in the elegant but not formal dining room, and perused the list of aperitifs: various New Age-y drinks with names like "Unwind" and ingredients like ginseng and fruit juices. I was surprised none of them offered wheatgrass shots. Hans ordered the Unwind, Mark the Diamond Mind. Melissa and I each got the Orange Jewel. The Orange Jewel tasted like an elegant liquid orange creamsicle. We all enjoyed the flavors and the texture and found the aperitifs refreshing.
While we enjoyed the aperitifs, I perused the wine selection. Roxanne's extensive wine list leans towards lighter and food-friendly wines. There is a section of Cabernet Sauvignon, which strikes me as inappropriate. I can't imagine drinking such a heavy wine with such lightweight food. The wine list pairs well with the restaurant's philosophy as well and highlights wine from producers who make an effort to be organic. I chose a 1998 Salomon Spatlese Riesling to start, which prompted the sommelier to have an amiable chat with me about Salomon's wines. He asked if I had tasted older vintages of Salomon before (I had, once), and told me that the wine I ordered was one of Michael Klein's favorites. The wine had passed into that more mature phase of riesling where the wine acquires petrol aromas and becomes more unctuous. Heavenly, and the slight sweetness complemented the cuisine nicely. For our red wine, we consulted with the sommelier, and he suggested three wines which were particularly good at that moment and met our criteria (light, no oak) and price range. We chose the 2002 Failla Pinot Noir, which was everything a Pinot Noir should be: cherries and flowers and earth and balance. Truly a stunning wine which captivated all of us as we drank it. (Failla is partly owned by Ehren Jordan, Larry Turley's wine maker).
We decided to do the chef's tasting menu, which required that everyone at the table had to want it. This is not uncommon, but it annoys me, perhaps because I have lost the opportunity to try some tasting menus because not everyone at the table agreed. We didn't need to work hard (at all, really) to convince Hans and Mark.
The kitchen sent out an amuse-bouche, a watermelon granita (think snow cone for a textural image). Hans quipped that they start you with something cold so that you'll find later dishes relatively warm. The texture of the granita was very even, with ice that was just the right level of coarseness. The watermelon flavor was well-balanced, neither subtle nor overpowering.
The first course was "almond cheese with pistachio, fennel and kumquat marmalade". The nut "cheese" Roxanne's makes is a staple ingredient, and a time-consuming chore if you want to prepare it from her book. This was a simple log of it, and the texture was reminiscent of a smooth young goat cheese, though of course it had a pronounced almond flavor. It had been rolled in fennel seed and crushed pistachios, which complemented the flavor nicely and added a nice textural contrast. The kumquat marmalade was the tiniest little quenelle I've ever seen, a perfect peaked oval with a base the size of a dime. It was sharply acidic and intensely flavored, which offset the slight sweetness of the cheese. The dish was served with two "crackers" which seemed to be compressed and dehydrated flax seed (dehydrators are used in abundance at the restaurant).
After this was their "bento box", four small treats served on four square plates set into a larger chaser ("our fine china bento box," said our server). The lower right was a small bowl of a miso soup with wakame, a type of seaweed. The upper right was just a few leaves of Kaisou, a delicate seaweed ("sea vegetable" said our server, perhaps worried about frightening us with the truth), accompanied by a cilantro sauce (a purée, one imagines) and herb shoyu (soy sauce). The upper left was "sushi rolls" featuring chopped parsnips and other vegetables. I heard her say the kitchen uses chopped parsnips to emulate the texture of rice, but that didn't really register until I ate a roll. These were tiny, tiny cubes. They felt even smaller than a brunoise. Sharp knives in that kitchen. Finally, the bento box featured a daikon radish "ravioli" filled with more nut cheese that was also used in the accompanying sauce. This was the bite that really stood out for us on this plate: paper-thin slices of daikon radish pressed together with liquid "cheese" in the middle.
The next course showcased the extremely fresh produce Roxanne's hunts down or grows at the gardens at the nearby Klein household. The "heirloom tomato carpaccio" featured three razor-thin slices of tomato (cut by hand we later learned, not by mandoline as I guessed). One tomato had a pesto of some form on top, and that was used to anchor a small Early Girl tomato. They cheated slightly on the last; they blanched this small tomato to help peel it. The sommelier assisted with service to some degree and sprinkled our plates with olive oil. The olive oil comes from 400-year-old trees. It is sold to just five restaurants in the country, we were informed. It was intensely flavorful, with loads of peppery spice. The tomatoes had a sharp acidity, though they did not conflict with the Pinot Noir we had moved to by this point (of course, Pinot Noir has its own acidity which is why I opted for it). The flavor was intense, unadulterated tomato. With tomatoes like this, I had to agree that cooking them in any way would have been a shame. That is the basis for caprese salads, after all.
The marinated portabella mushroom with creamed corn, green garlic, and celery hearts was perhaps my favorite dish. The thin strips of mushrooms were warm, heated in a marinade that was presumably at the restaurant's maximum of 118. The corn's sweetness offered a nice counterpoint to the spicy earthiness of the marinated portabella, and the single celery heart was a burst of celery flavor.
Before the "main course", the menu featured a palate cleanser of four leaves of Little Gem lettuce, each nestling some avocado, grapefruit, and "Thai herbs": basil and one other I didn't recognize. A wonderful change, but neither Melissa nor I tried to drink our wine with it. She skipped it altogether, and I drank water between bites and sips of wine. We were worried that the grapefruit's tartness would overpower the wine.
Our server told us that our entrée would be "cannelloni" with "shells" of thin strips of zucchini and a stuffing of sun-dried tomatoes and pesto. The plate was garnished with a tiny sprig of garden spinach. I don't know why they differentiate this plate as the entrée. It was not a more intensely-flavored dish than its predecessors. It wasn't any weightier. It would make more sense to not affix any label at all.
The two desserts made for a tricky wine pairing. The first was "First of summer" berries with vanilla bean cream (I don't remember what the base for the cream was). The second was a chocolate brownie sundae with fresh bananas and candied nuts. The wine director suggested a Banyuls, which at least didn't clash with the berries but of course went marvelously with the chocolate.
If you know how chocolate is made, that last dessert might give you pause. To make chocolate, you start by roasting cacao beans at temperatures far and above 118. Our friend Mark said the Raw book has some chocolate recipes which are prefaced with the simple sentiment that chocolate isn't raw, but it's damn good. I guess there are limits on what the Kleins will give up (I also remember quotes by Roxanne herself saying that sometimes she eats a steak).
Both desserts were quite good, continuing the trend of simple, pure flavors integrated into a synergistic whole that defined our meal.
I asked if we could tour the kitchen, and the wait staff graciously agreed (though the downstairs, where one finds the bank of dehydrators, was too busy on a weekend night). The kitchen was an interesting experience. No heat (a single high-end hot plate does the minimal heating for the whole kitchen). No stoves. Just a line of chefs assembling ingredients on plates. Melissa also noticed that there weren't the normal cooking smells one finds in a kitchen. We chatted a bit with the chef de cuisine, a CIA graduate. I asked him how he had adjusted from his CIA training ("you mean at the anti-CIA that is Roxanne's" he asked). He offered a predictable response: "it's challenging. it's different. you learn a lot about ingredients."
All in all, I summarized our meal as "interesting, very good, and surprisingly varied". The flavors were often intense, but well balanced, with elements that complemented each other nicely. Each plate's features harmonized nicely. I recommended it to some co-workers who have been interested for some time. It's a restaurant I'd go back to, though I'm not about to switch over to a raw lifestyle.