- [Richard] I realized at a very early stage
that really good food is about cooking and flavor.
It's not about meat.
I realized it wasn't the meat that tasted so good,
it's what chefs did to it.
And I realized that you have to appeal
to people through flavor.
Most people would rather have a great vegetarian dish,
rather than a bad meat dish.
People want good food.
Cook good food and they will come.
- Was a die hard carnivore,
and I found out where meat came from at an early age.
And I was hit with this immediate ethical dilemma.
It hit me like a ton of bricks,
that something so delicious can be representative
of such cruelty.
I just had to find this vegetarian way of life.
So I taught myself to cook that way.
How to get these layers of flavor,
these deep, smoky, roasted, caramelized,
wonderful depths of flavor into my food.
I said, "Maybe I could do this professionally.
Maybe people really do want the same kind of food."
So I opened up my first little cafe.
- I ended up working with Rich
for one summer at the restaurant,
way back in the day 'cause I was already a customer,
I loved it.
I was able to go to work everyday,
be challenged and inspired in a restaurant environment,
eat the most delicious food,
and have immediate gratification where customers were like,
"This is so delicious. If I could eat this way all the time,
I could be vegetarian."
- [Richard] And people were coming in like crazy.
Not just hippies and stoners and health nuts,
but families, people in suits and ties.
They were all coming in for this food.
The radish is just a representative
of what we've always tried to do.
- [Kate] I always pointed to it as one
of my favorite dishes,
because it really just encapsulated
what we were trying to do.
You take this very humble vegetable like a radish.
You just think of your plain, salad bar radish.
And yet there's so many varieties of radishes,
and you can do so many things to bring out their colors,
flavors, textures.
- [Richard] We have purple ninjas right now,
Spanish black skin radishes,
of course watermelon radishes.
They have this flesh that just it's so beautiful
and silky and creamy.
When you cook them, people say it looks like ahi tuna.
And its something that no one would have ever
expected from a radish.
There is kind of a Japanese underlying theme here.
We use smoked soy sauce.
We have a yuzu avocado puree
that helps add the richness when you eat it.
We have what we call nori soil,
which is black sesame seeds, black salt, and nori
ground up in the coffee mill
to make this kind of dark soil that's full
of the sea funk and salty sesame flavor.
It's just delicious.
And it all comes together on this plate
in this beautiful little radish garden.
And to me, just eats so harmoniously.
The crunch, the creaminess from roasting them,
the marinating, the pickling, all that comes together.
Dan Dan Noodles at its most basic are noodles
with chili oil and pork.
This is like one of these original street foods.
A guy used to walk around these villages.
He'd have a long stick on his neck,
and two pots hanging off one side.
One pot was full of the noodles and the hot water.
The other was full of sauce and he'd go like this
and you'd have your dan dan noodles right off the street.
And so, I set off to create our own version of that.
Of course a vegan version.
We do these five spiced mushrooms on top.
You have the sauce, and the secret ingredient's tahini,
some sesame paste and that way we get
to add as much heat as we want.
Tons and tons of heat,
but it's kind of tempered with the tahini.
So you have this canvas of sesame paste
to paint these really spicy, vivid flavors on.
And on top of that, we have out ginger
and our Szechuan peppercorns and all the great things
that make Szechuan food what it is.
Szechuan food just completely changed everything
for us when we got to try it.
It's just addictive.
- [Kate] By the time you get to dessert
you should be full right?
You're eating for the soul at that point.
So you want it to be absolutely decadent, rich,
beautiful, perfect.
And yet, at the same time, through the mission
of a vegetable restaurant, I love the idea
of sneaking in some vegetable ingredients.
And I think carrots are really the perfect example
because of carrot cake. It's such an obvious one.
For a long time I stayed away from it
'cause I thought it was too cliche,
but I thought, You know what let's do it,
but rather than just serve a slice of carrot cake,
we decided to present it a little differently.
So it's actually got two layers of cream cheese.
One that's done in a sort of panna cotta style,
with chunks of moist carrot cake that are layered in.
And then we also take some roasted sort of wheels
of carrot and some golden raisins and sort of
plump them back up so that they're a little bit
soaked and juicy.
We do a scoop of a roasted carrot ice cream.
When I was a little girl, my mom used
to make a pot roast with carrots.
I remember the flavor of the carrots
when they were roasted like that.
There was this salty, savoriness to them.
So for this ice cream, we actually roast
the carrots ahead of time.
And it ends up having this beautiful savory
kind of quality to it.
So a scoop of that in there.
We do a walnut streusel to give a little bit
of crunch and texture in there.
And the last element, of course, is the cream cheese frosting.
I'm a frosting girl. (laughs)
Some people get the birthday cake
and they just want the cake, and I'm like,
"Give me the corner piece, with like all the extra piping."
So to me, having that frosting in there is really important.
And to me, it just like delivers on everything
you want out of a perfect carrot cake.
- [Richard] New York is saturated with vegan restaurants.
DC had very, very, very few.
- [Kate] Yeah the restaurants were all
excellent at accommodating a vegan diner,
but they didn't specialize in it.
A lot of people are coming in here and they want
to have a fantastic meal and try some really great food.
But we've been doing this a really long time.
Really carving out our own approach
to cooking vegan food.
So it's just fascinating to see how
people approach their meal differently.
No longer do they have to have an entree
that had protein, starch, veg, and sauce.
It was sort of like, "OK I'm going to be more open-minded
to all kinds of food."
So I think that allowed us to really develop
and sort of push boundaries.
I feel like we've become vegan translators. You know?
- [Richard] Yeah. Yeah.