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Best of the New: Food and Restaurants
A bright addition in Watertown’s Coolidge Square, from the spring-green walls to the cafe’s globe-trotting menu, all of which is vegan or vegetarian. Choices include Mexican pizza, grilled tofu with a tandoori marinade, and pan-seared portobello mushrooms with mango chutney. And you can’t go wrong with the sweet potato quesadilla.
Vegetarians and vegans have a new restaurant choice at Watertown’s Red Lentil
When Pankaj Pradhan opened Red Lentil, he wanted to do vegan and vegetarian differently. Instead of focusing on one type of cuisine, Pradhan decided to build a menu that has a little bit of everything – except meat.
“It’s a way of bringing vegetarian and vegan food to people,” he said. “I, myself, am a vegetarian and I like to eat healthy, fresh, organic food.”
Red Lentil’s menu has dishes from around the world, including pizza, nachos and a vegan Rueben.
Pradhan said the key to making tasty vegetarian and vegan dishes is knowing the ingredients and how to season them.
“To put a plate together, it takes a lot of dedication,” he said.
After years as a vegetarian chef, Pradhan decided to strike out on his own. Initially, he wanted to set up shop in Cambridge.
“I was looking for someplace in Cambridge where Harvard and MIT are to provide nutritional food for the students,” said Pradhan.
But rent in the People’s Republic was too steep and Red Lentil found a home in Coolidge Square.
“It was the first location I saw and I said I’d go for it,” Pradhan said.
Red Lentil is a savory haven for vegans
When their food arrives, diners here sit and stare at their plates, which are colorful, architectural, and beautiful. Nirvana delight ($13), grilled tofu marinated in tandoori spices, comes as two thick triangles leaning on a pedestal of quinoa salad with lush spinach, beet relish, and a cucumber-yogurt sauce. The aromatic, tender bean curd and its crisp edges are slightly spicy, and the grain salad is flecked with the tiniest pieces of bell and hot peppers, yellow squash, and zucchini. Spinach seems to have been cooked just until the leaves sigh on the plate.
Health food mecca? More restaurants honor vegetarian, vegan, raw food philosophies
The Boston area isn’t generally thought of as a health food mecca. Prime rib, fried seafood, boiled dinner: These dishes represent our conservative culinary roots. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that the vegetarian, vegan, and raw restaurants that thrive in other cities have cropped up at a slower pace here.
Yet eating for health has a long history in the area. Macrobiotic pioneer Michio Kushi established the Kushi Institute in the Boston area in the late 1970s. Ann Wigmore, the grandmother of the raw food diet, started schools here a decade before that. With a large population of curious and adventurous students, this seems a natural market for restaurateurs catering to alternative diets.
This past year has seen a marked shift in that direction. A vegetarian restaurant, a vegan pizzeria, and three raw, vegan restaurants all opened in the fall. Another vegan restaurant, Vej Naturals, is in the midst of relocating from a tiny spot in Malden to a space three times its size in Somerville’s Davis Square. The new restaurant, to be called the Pulse Cafe, is slated to open later this month or early next month.
