Chef Andrea Potter gave up fine dining to work at an inexpensive vegan restaurant
Mia Stainsby
Sun
Andrea Potter sits with some dishes. They include grilled kebabs with saffron basmati and marinated carrot (left), radish and sprout salad, and nori roll. Photograph by : Ian Smith, Vancouver Sun
“I was finished with egos in kitchens of fine dining,” Andrea Potter says, explaining why she gave up swank for simplicity and health.
She’s the chef at Radha Yoga and Eatery, an alternative, second-floor vegan restaurant. It’s only open only three evenings a week, from Thursday to Saturday, and it’s a stark contrast to her job in Belfast, Ireland making pastries in a restaurant that until recently, had a Michelin star, meaning it was pretty fabulous.
She moved to Vancouver two years ago and worked as entremetier (preparing veggies) at Feenie’s for about five months before she moved over to Radha. “Fine dining wasn’t jiving with my personal philosophy on food,” she says. At Radha, she shows that vegan food can be interesting. I wasn’t enthralled with all of the dishes but overall, the food is delicious enough to draw me back. Her customers, she says, are omnivores, not just vegans.
She puts huge effort into wringing nutrition out of ingredients. Example: the mushroom and almond ‘ricotta’ napoleon, a layering of crimini mushroom duxelle (a mushroom paste of shallots, herbs) and Fraser Valley almond ‘ricotta’ between sheets of crisp, whole wheat phyllo. For the almond ricotta, she soaks the nuts to activate enzymes (like sprouted seeds) and grinds it into a paste with miso, lemon juice, herbs and sea salt. Fermented ingredients, like the miso, is a running theme in her dishes for its health benefits. It’s a delicious dish befitting of a high-end restaurant.
Some items on the menu are holdovers from Radha’s earlier days when it just served lunch. Regulars didn’t want to part with them. Potter calls them Classics on the menu — the nori roll with raw sunflower and hempseed paté with sprouts, avocado and julienned veggies wrapped in nori; masala yam wedges; a grain bowl with veggies, sprouts, hempseed over brown rice and a choice of sauce; quinoa nut burger, a mile-high burger that comes loaded.
Potter introducing new dishes every month. In February, I had a lovely beet and orange salad and a raw food pizza made with a cashew nut crust; my husband liked his potato blini with eggplant caviar and a polenta lasagne. For dessert, a yummy vanilla almond panna cotta with a strawberry balsamic compote.
She buys as much organic as she can and manages to keep prices very reasonable ($7 for appetizers and $13 for mains). When I visited this month, a couple of dishes didn’t work for me. The roasted garlic cannellini bean ragout with scalloped potatoes and squash gratin was too stodgey and the nori roll was too mushy for my liking. The quinoa burger was big and bodacious but I wasn’t too keen about the raw chocolate banana cream pie with coconut date crust, though — it was too dense for me, but my husband liked it fine.
And guess what? There’s a wine list offering really reasonably priced wines. But I went straight for the kombucha tea, which is fermented with a kombucha colony of yeast cultures. It’s supposed to be very cleansing and besides, believe it or not, Potter makes up a wickedly delicious, light and sassy brew.
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RADHA YOGA AND EATERY
728 Main St., 604-605-0011.
www.radhavancouver.org.
© The Vancouver Sun 2008