Food & Wine Highlights “America’s Best Vegan Chef” Tal Ronnen & His Restaurant
If you have not heard of vegan chef, cookbook author and restaurant owner Tal Ronnen, he is considered to be the “best vegan chef in America” according to Oprah Winfrey.
Food & Wine recently ran a feature highlighting the chef and his L.A.-based restaurant Crossroads, which was “one of the first elevated, chef-driven restaurants not to serve meat” when it opened in 2013.
The team sampled crab cakes, artichoke oysters, a salad with baby beets and walnuts and nubs of goat ‘cheese’, grilled maitake mushrooms, and sweet potato and chanterelles with pomegranate glaze. The highlight, however, seemed to be the pasta carbonara, which featured a plant-based egg yolk:
“Poke it with your knife, and the yolk resists ever so slightly, just how you’d expect. But poke a little harder, and it bursts and flows unctuously, coating the pasta. Take a bite, and it’s sweet, just like a yolk, although without the faint metallic note. It’s less rich of course, but the mouthfeel is remarkably similar. A breath of eggy flavor, ever so delicate, is imparted in the yolk by Himalayan black salt. It has sulfur, which doesn’t sound very appetizing, but it is used to great effect. The simplicity of the final result belies the weeks of tinkering it took to create it.”
The mouth-watering meals of Crossroads have been featured in Farm Sanctuary’s Compassionate Meals Program with Alicia Silverstone, as well as in a roundtable organized by PETA featuring Waka Flocka Flame, Mýa and Russell Simmons.
The Food & Wine article ends noting that:
“One day, Tal Ronnen’s Crossroads won’t be called a plant-based restaurant. It will be called, simply, a restaurant. And we eagerly anticipate that day.”
For those interested in sampling some of Ronnen’s plant-based recipes, he provided Vogue with three winter-inspired comforting and nutritious options right here!
Photo Credit: Tal Ronnen/Food&Wine
