The process behind this week’s column was unconventional. I typically make my visits to restaurants anonymously to ensure that the experience I have is the experience anyone else can have.
Otherwise, if a restaurateur knows I’m coming, suddenly all kinds of special things start to happen like the standard wine glass becomes a delicate Riedel crystal balloon, or the basic beef burger magically transforms into a truffled wagyu patty on brioche.
For this review, however, I was not anonymous. I reached out to Nut Tree Café owner Miro Sino in advance of my visit because I wanted to do an in-depth column on kombucha and preferred to interview a local producer who is neither a brewer nor the subject of a recent column.
When Sino and I met up at her café, a small but warm, counter-service operation with art adorning the walls, I quickly realized that there was a lot more to Nut Tree than the kombucha angle I had been bent on pursuing.
When I arrived, Sino and her team were putting the finishing touches on an ambitious spread for me, designed to showcase the variety of the menu, which features all vegan, all gluten free, mostly organic, largely sprouted grain fare, made from scratch on premise. I grabbed a seat and as dish after dish issued from the kitchen, my story angle necessarily changed focus. You see, Nut Tree Café is one of those rare places with such a passionate commitment to a singular mission that it commands my attention and respect, even if 90 per cent of the food I typically consume is anathema to its principles.
Nut Tree Café, as Sino explained to me, aims to help all people orient themselves towards better, healthier food choices and supports the vegan community with a robust menu of creative offerings. Sino’s menu employs a lot of sprouted grains and seeds, the idea being that both taste and health benefits positively increase exponentially when sprouting occurs. Sino cites as inspiration Ann Wigmore, a well-known advocate of raw, sprouted foods and sometimes controversial figure who believed in the extraordinary healing powers of the right diet. I found Nut Tree Café’s sprouted dishes to be both creative and, by and large, tasty enough.
I think it can be challenging for people like me, who have a lifetime of powerful and fond memories around foods that conventionally bear a certain name (like hamburger, pizza, spaghetti, taco, etc.) to experience vegan and gluten free dishes that bear the same name, without immediately making comparisons between them and finding deficiencies.
For instance, considered on its own the Nut Tree Café’s Veggie Burger, made of a patty of sprouted chickpeas, nuts and seeds and topped with tomato, green pepper, lettuce and housemade nut cheese served on gluten-free, sprouted spelt bread, is a tasty, fresh and undeniably filling dish. It is served with a delicate bouquet of seasoned kale and a side salad of spouted quinoa. But for me there was initially a troubling disconnect between the flavours and textures of the sandwich and my deeply entrenched view of what constitutes a burger.
My advice to future Nut Tree Café patrons who, like me, are not well versed in the alternative iterations of dishes that comprise vegan cuisine, is to try to get out of your head long enough to take the dishes at face value, appreciating the subtlety and nuance of what has been prepared for you. It is well worth the effort, in my estimation, in part because it represents an entirely independent culinary tradition. Just as you might go out for Italian food, sushi, or pizza, going out for vegan (again, for those of us who have not taken it on as a full-time dietary commitment) can be an exhilarating and refreshing experience.
Two open faced sandwiches, one with brazil nut cheese and avocado, the other with garlic-enlivened, marinated eggplant and macadamia nut cheese, were my favourite dishes of the sampling. The bread was made of sprouted flaxseed, which is tightly compressed and then dehydrated, resulting in a flat, chewy product that reminded me in flavour and texture of a cross between pumpernickel and Rainforest Crisps. The nut cheeses, which are also for sale in take-home jars (I bought a jar of the macadamia version to spread on toast at home) have a remarkably complex taste and reminded me a bit of Boursin.
A third open-faced number of flax bread and Nut Tree’s own VeganTella, a spread of chocolate and toasted hazelnuts, was surprisingly rich and was nicely counterbalanced by a ramekin of orange preserve.
An oat crust pizza made topped with tomato, olives, crispy kale and nut cheese was, I’m afraid, a bit too far removed from my understanding of pizza to resonate with me; I guess I’m just not there yet.
As for the kombuchas, well, let’s just say Sino’s versions are unique to her. Usually kombucha starts with a base of tea. Sino’s starts with a base of rejuvelac, a beverage realized by sprouting quinoa in water. Rejuvelac is added to water-based kefir and maple syrup, which initiates the requisite fermentation process. The kombuchas are then flavoured and coloured with either pickled beet juice or an edible, bright blue algae derivative, resulting in beverages with vibrant hues of pink and blue.
The significant labour of preparation and high quality organic ingredients mean that Nut Tree’s unique wares don’t come cheap; my admittedly robust tasting was $80. But I suspect, factoring in time and ingredients, one would be hard-pressed to recreate these meals at home for much less.
Nut Tree Café is located at 2114 Old Dollarton Rd. Nuttree.ca. 604.990.8885.
