Don’t accuse me.
I’ll confess.
My eating habits are unconventional.
I’m whole-food vegetarian since celebrated Angelica Kitchen occupied a hot jammed storefront one block east of Trash and Vaudeville on grimy Saint Marks Place.
As a chopstick clicking, glassy-eyed evangelical macro-neophyte, I rained a heavy-hand of sesame gomasio onto every mouthful of hijiki-laced Dragon Bowl. My innate palate for nature’s true flavors did not spring forth overnight.
I’ve followed the fundamentalist quest from one camp to the next. Swinging like a B-Movie Queen on a vine: raw food to cooked, ayurvedic to live, congee to kichari. All the while sprouting, soaking, juicing, judging.
The food-freak believes in manna.
Food as the path to knowledge.
Nirvana via the alimentary canal.
A quest for the one perfect food among the many.
Goji berry!
Jungle peanut?
Wheatgrass juice!
Early morning mid-stream sip of urine?
Gandhi drank his, the enthusiast promptly iterates. Suggesting that daily urine drinking is the foundation for peaceful revolution and democratic self-rule.
Moreover that he and Gandhi are woven of one cloth: DIY home spun, seasonally, and locally grown.
Artwork by Barry Silver
This nutritional nectar lifts the seeker to a pinnacle of knowledge. From these heights, often mistaking his sprouting jar for a papal dispensation, the seeker beatifically glows.
Or rather gloats.
In a superior sense-of-self, with license to judge all ordinary food eaters (um, err everyone, that is).
At that stratosphere, the whole nourish-thyself jag becomes just a little too precious.
Precious.
Yes, that’s how I felt about dining at Pure Food and Wine .
The garden is gorgeous. As is the staff.
If you arrive for dinner, having dashed the city from early morning, toiled a job (which you’ll be grateful you have when the bill arrives), your hunger may not be sated by these small-plate portions. Unless you arrive a self-satisfied raw-foodist.
In that case, enjoy! A sliver of papery turnip ruffled over a blobble of nut puree may actually look and taste like ravioli.
Methinks raw food living best enjoyed naked under a Hawaiian coconut palm, sucking sticky mango flesh off someone else’s fingers while reclining just outside the front flap of your yurt.
A name is after all, only that.
Dining in Pure’s garden with Popeye-gunned, first-husband The Impact Addict, how pure could a girl feel?
Purity is a state of mind.
Or not.
