Haute Vegan, With a Twist

Midweek, and they’re elbow-to-elbow at Roxanne Klein’s new restaurant--people in suits, in caftans, in a huff in the spice-fragrant doorway, muttering, “Why are we standing? Is there a reason we’re still standing? Is there a reason we can’t sit while we wait for our table to open up?”

As a matter of fact, there is a reason. Every seat in the house is taken. Even the barstools are full, from the nook where a balding man with a self-help book wants asparagus soup to the wall where Alice Waters’ former personal assistant sits tete-a-tete with Klein’s organic gardener. It has been like this for weeks--the blinking phone lines, the jostling in-crowds, the office manager telling foodie after foodie that she’s sorry, but Roxanne’s is booked a month in advance now.

This, for a place where the specialty is uncooked fruits, nuts and veggies.

“The other day we came in, and there were 100 messages on the answering machine,” the incredulous chef-owner sighed.

Who knew that the buzz of the West Coast fine-dining sector would turn to a haute cuisine version of a regimen that even hard-core vegetarians view as extreme? Tucked into the main street of this leafy Marin County suburb, the 5-month-old Roxanne’s has been packing ‘em in, to competitors’ amazement, with all-organic, all-vegan “raw” foods--no meat, no fish, no eggs, no dairy and, above all, no stove in the kitchen.

Nothing is heated beyond 118 degrees, dehydrators and sunlight are used instead of ovens, produce is just-picked and meals--presented on her favorite high-end Bernardaud china, feature such ingredients as “cheese” made from cashews and young coconut “noodles.” It’s a concept that, attempted by other restaurateurs, has shown all the mainstream appeal of a high colonic. Klein, however, has critics raving.

“Complex and voluptuous,” said Food & Wine magazine.

“Don’t be surprised if some of these ideas start showing up on other menus,” said the Wine Spectator.

“You may find it hard to suppress a gasp of delight,” wrote Michael Bauer, the San Francisco Chronicle’s notoriously tough restaurant critic, lauding the “miracle” of Klein’s yellow curry winter vegetables and whipped parsnips and her nut-milk ice creams, which are “as good as those made with cream.” The review--which set off a veritable Bay Area stampede to the restaurant--gave Roxanne’s a rare 3 1/2 out of 4 stars.

It has been a dizzying ascent for Klein, a 38-year-old mother and stepmother to four, whose career has progressed in fits and starts for more than 12 years. As recently as 1990, she was dropping out of the California Culinary Academy just shy of graduation to have her first baby; she would complete her degree four years later.

Now Charlie Trotter, the Chicago chef, is writing a cookbook and demonstrating techniques at major food industry shows with her. Ron Siegel, who last year reopened San Francisco’s classic French stalwart, Masa’s, says Roxanne’s is not only “well-conceived” but “more unique than I’ve seen in a long time.” Even Marion Cunningham, the culinary grand dame and friend of Chez Panisse’s Waters, says she is “anxious to eat there.”

“Everyone’s talking about it,” Cunningham said, “and from what I understand, it’s a great surprise--people say it’s really that good.”

Of course, that’s just the on-the-record part of what people are saying. The other part has to do with the restaurant’s unorthodox business plan. Six years ago, the former Roxanne Sohns, the daughter of Central Valley schoolteachers, married Michael Klein, a wealthy environmental activist; they have announced that any profit she makes will go to charities and environmental causes.

“We don’t need the money, she says, walking through the garden behind her new five-bedroom mansion and guest house, which are made entirely of rammed Earth and recycled materials. “We’re happy where we’re at, and so it gives us no greater joy than to give back to the planet.”

That approach, praised by some, has confounded a whole other set of critics--competitors who say that Klein’s deep pockets make it impossible to fairly compare her acclaim with that of restaurateurs whose backers demand a return on their investments.

Unlike others in the Bay Area’s recession-strained restaurant sector, they say, Klein has been able to afford top-quality ingredients, moderate menu prices, decor that is both sumptuous and ecologically friendly, time-consuming preparation methods and a staff that reads like a roster of restaurant industry all-stars. Her chef de cuisine is Stephanie Valentine, a former chef at Charlie Trotter’s. Michael Judge, her restaurant manager, opened three of the Bay Area’s highest-ranked destination restaurants--Masa’s, Aqua and Gary Danko. Her wine list was designed by Larry Stone of Rubicon, the oenophiles’ mecca in San Francisco.

Before opening, Klein and her husband researched their menu by commissioning nine-course tasting menus from chefs across the nation, including such luminaries as Trotter and the French Laundry’s Thomas Keller.

“You can’t pass real-world judgment on what she’s doing,” carped a staffer at one top-tier restaurant who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Added another: “Comparing her to everybody else is like having a race where one guy has a Porsche and everybody else has to ride a bicycle. What they’re doing is definitely interesting, but it’s more like philanthropy than running a restaurant.”

That observer, a chef, also wondered whether Klein would stick with the grind of the business, given the fact that, financially, she doesn’t have to: “Have you ever worked in a kitchen 16 hours a day, day after day after day after day?”

In the health-food world, meanwhile, hard-core raw-food fans are debating her essential raw-ness.

“Her limit is 118 degrees?” sniffed Don Kidson of the Living Lighthouse, a Santa Monica raw-food collective that hosts support groups and living-foods potlucks. “How long is something going to live at 118 degrees? Here, the dehydrators are set no higher than 105. She might as well be serving cooked food.”

Not to mention her inclusion of wine, which, Klein says, is technically raw because the grapes aren’t heated. “Alcohol kills brain cells,” Kidson noted. “I mean, need I say more?”

Even Klein’s fans aren’t sure whether the project falls under the category of “shockingly delicious” or whether the peg should be “deliciously shocking.”

“No one can quite figure it out,” says chef and Napa Valley winery owner Maria Helm Sinskey, whose 1999 Sinskey Los Carneros Merlot is on the extensive wine list. “They’ve created this working model to work within luxury dining, and everyone who goes comes back saying it’s like an otherworldly experience. But the question is, where are they going with it? What’s their motive? Is this just one big dinner party for their friends or is it a revolution?

“It’s just amazing, how young this restaurant is and how controversial it’s already become.”

Klein says she isn’t sure how to feel about the attention. A tiny, thin woman with the sort of porcelain skin and preternaturally clear irises that imply a seriously toxin-free diet, she says she just wants “to share my enthusiasm for organic produce and to express my creativity.”

Her dream of opening a restaurant, she says, is anything but a vanity project. Rather, it dates to her childhood, when she watched Julia Child on TV instead of cartoons and was able, as a 4-year-old, to sit through a two-hour meal in France during a family vacation. She didn’t become a vegetarian until she entered UC Santa Cruz, she says. Even then, her commitment was on-and-off, particularly during her culinary training. “I’m not doing this to be dogmatic,” she said, noting that she’s not above the occasional finishing touch of forbidden cocoa, maple syrup or 100-year-old balsamic vinegar. “This is just my take on the most exciting, sensual way to prepare seasonal food. I think of this as a fine-dining restaurant first.”

Klein’s interest in raw food began about a year after she met her current husband. Like her, he was a vegan when they were introduced by a mutual friend in 1995. She was the divorced mother of a 4-year-old and had gotten her degree, interning at Stars in San Francisco and apprenticing in kitchens in Provence. She was at a crossroads, she says, weighing a move to Paris against a return to California.

“I had set my daughter up to go to school in France, but we were back [in Marin County] for a visit with her father,” she remembered. “Some friends were trying to convince me to stay. I told them if they found me a place with a big organic garden, I’d consider it.”

Shortly thereafter, she was introduced to Michael Klein, a retired tech entrepreneur whose garden--on the former Corte Madera estate of Bill Graham, the late music producer--covered three acres. Having sworn after the sale of his last telecommunications company “never again to work on something I didn’t love,” as he put it, Michael Klein was serving on the board of the Rainforest Action Network and running a guitar company founded by his friend, Grateful Dead guitarist Bob Weir.

“We went to a Grateful Dead concert, my first one,” Roxanne Klein recalled, laughing. The two were married a year later. Michael Klein said they began talking almost immediately about a restaurant, but the idea didn’t take shape until 1996, during a trip with Weir and actor Woody Harrelson to a spa in Thailand.

“We were eating these curries,” Roxanne Klein said, “and Woody just kept having these green papaya salads. When I asked why he ate that way, he said, ‘Why don’t you try it?’” The Kleins spent a month on a raw-food diet, she said, “and when it ended, I couldn’t believe how great I felt. I needed two or three fewer hours of sleep a night, I had so much energy.”

The experiment rekindled a childhood passion for garden-fresh food, she said. “I’m a fifth-generation Californian,” she said, “and my grandparents were organic farmers--it was years and years before I realized that some people bought food from stores. My grandpa used to take me outside and say, ‘What do you smell today?’ And I’d say, ‘Strawberries and peaches.’ And he’d say ‘OK, then. That’s what’s ready to harvest.’ And that sensual experience, of taking the peach from the tree, and eating it fresh, and the perfume and the juices--it all came back to me,” she recalled.

Though she was writing a book on vegetarian tasting menus at the time, she says, she shelved the project in favor of restaurant research, this time with a focus on raw--or as advocates call them, “living”--foods. The regimen has moved in and out of fashion in the health-food world, and was last in vogue in the mid-1990s. Raw-food fans believe that crucial enzymes are destroyed if food is heated past 118 degrees. (Conventional nutritionists say heat makes little difference, though raw food is an important source of fiber and nutrients.)

Klein says she put herself on a sort of extended tutorial, beginning at a San Francisco restaurant her sister had told her about called Raw. Run by a then-24-year-old chef named Juliano Brotman who wore his long blond hair in a topknot, the place featured standard hippie-shack salads and smoothies, but also offered such unusual dishes as “pizza” fashioned from sun-dried sprouted buckwheat. The reviews--like those of most vegetarian eateries--were as tepid as the “mock salmon” Brotman made from seawater and the dregs of juiced carrots, but critics praised his innovation.

“Not to blow my own horn, but before I got out there, there was nothing but hummus and wheat grass,” says Brotman, who now lives in Santa Monica, where he hosts raw-food “raves.” He runs a raw-food delivery service and plans to open a raw-food restaurant in August.

Klein says she paid Brotman to introduce her to the complex food processing and dehydrating techniques that now characterize her kitchen. Then she moved on to consult with more widely known chefs such as Trotter, at whose restaurant Michael Klein had been a regular for more than a decade.

“They came first for vegetarian food, then for vegan food, then for raw food,” Trotter said. When they requested a tasting menu from him, he said, “it became an exciting intellectual challenge to come up with all these possibilities.”

Over time, he said, he and Roxanne Klein exchanged ideas, and he became convinced that her methods will become the next food wave. Their book is scheduled for publication in January by Ten Speed Press. Trotter says that, because Klein’s food is as delicious as food in any upscale restaurant, she will do for raw cuisine what visionaries such as Waters did for organic produce. “Every once in a while, people come along and what they do ends up not only being embraced by the public, but copied by chefs around the country,” said Trotter. “That’s what Roxanne is doing, whether or not she realizes it.”

Not everyone agrees. Siegel of Masa’s says he has had “very little” demand for raw food in his restaurants. And, he says, raw preparation is vastly different from conventional techniques: “I don’t know if you’re going to find a lot of restaurants who can afford to do what they do.”

For the moment, however, there is Klein’s food, which, in fact, is extraordinary, from her take on pad thai--so complex and mouthwatering that, on that midweek night, diners were trading forkfuls of it in amazement--to her desserts, which taste the way desserts did in childhood. Even Siegel, who prefers his food cooked, is unsurprised by the rush to Roxanne’s.

“The public,” he said, “is basically getting to benefit from her situation. And the food really is good.”