I'm so glad Roxanne's closed.
You may know of the celebrated raw-food restaurant in Larkspur with its beautiful, blonde, yoga-practicing chef and her zillionaire eco-freak, electric car driving husband. He was her benefactor -- in fact, he admitted to keeping menu prices artificially low for the first few months in order to build up a fan base. Over time, the place got expensive, as you might expect.
It was a very labor-intensive restaurant. Imagine all the planning that goes into soaking nuts days in advance to make "cheese," the dehydrating of pretend crackers and miniature tortillas, the insane amount of extracting and sculpting and coaxing unusual ingredients into semi-realistic-looking replicas of sushi and lasagna (no fish! no cooked rice! no noodles!).
Come to think of it, imagine all the fingers touching your food -- stacking, squeezing, drizzling, twisting. The presentations were always fabulous, no question. And the food was actually quite delicious, even if everything on the plate was the same temperature. (Just how did they manage to get the dining room to smell so delicious? Was there somebody in the kitchen illicitly boiling a pot of broth and wafting aromas into the room?)
I couldn't afford to patronize the place, and yet it was such a mesmerizing concept, I thought about it often.
Then Mr. Roxanne pulled the plug. The scuttlebutt at one Mill Valley coffeehouse was that Mrs. Roxanne was having a dalliance with a busboy.
I'm so glad I don't have to think about Roxanne's anymore.
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9 comments:
I never quite understood the concept of that place (and others like it). If you want to "eat raw," shouldn't you just have a salad and be done with it?
P.S. Discovered you through Becks & Posh.
Hi farmgirl and marla. Nice to get a little traffic here (thanks to Sam).
i actually did eat there once.
It was an amazing experience but one i wouldn't repeat. Well, I can't now, anyway!
I keep meaning to write about it one day.
lol, this is too funny.
Randi: You've been burrowing in the archives! How cool.
Loved this post! Laughed out loud!
Thank you!
Pam
Pam: I must respond. Thanks! But how the heck...?
:-)
i went. it was 4 years ago. honestly, i loved it. it was bizarre but fabulous. since then i've been to 'pure food and wine' in nyc. the same kinda thing. same kinda prices. but again - i love that kinda stuff... in one of my recent 'phases' i went raw vegan for 4 months - bought all the books - did an 18 day water fast in panama - and then said fuck it all and that was the end of that. but i still do appreciate the ingenuity...
Claudia: I have the Roxanne's cookbook, "Raw." My real estate agent "thinks" he's a raw vegan now, although he's currently spending two months in France, and you know what that will do to your diet. Anyway, I promised him a raw dinner. Yeep.... Gonna check out that crazy book.
Glad you came to your senses.
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