Read an Excerpt

From
the Introduction: Native Foods and Me

"If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen." Family and friends in the restaurant business tried using that line to frighten me out of opening a restaurant, let alone an all-vegetarian one. They conjured up visions of too-difficult work and no money, problems with employees, quality-control worries, and "You'll have to add chicken and fish or you'll go out of business." The scare tactics didn't work. Having been born in the desert on a historically hot day of 125

degrees
Fahrenheit, by the time I had my back to a huge oven making fresh pitas and vegetarian pizzas, I wasn't flinching.

Being raised in a hot climate not only brought new meaning to the term "home fries" but also instilled in my character a tenacity that, along with my family influences, prepared me to become a vegan restaurant entrepreneur.

My parents were European immigrants and worked in the restaurant business by default. Dad was rounded up from a soccer field by German soldiers as a teen in
Yugoslavia and spent three years in a German labor camp. Mom was from a poor
Czechoslovakian family and, as the eldest of six, cooked for all her siblings during the war years. She said that's why she only wanted one kid, so I'm an only child. If they'd had an opportunity to choose a career, my dad would have been an engineer and my mother an opera singer, which might have precluded producing a kitchen kid with an independent mind.

No matter their past, my parents are true "foodies." My father was a
5-star maître d', serving the last twenty years of his fifty-plus in

the business at the exclusive Eldorado Country Club. My mother cooked like nobody's business day in and day out, and it was not your business until you were seated and the conversation was entirely about the meal and how it was prepared. Those who ate her meals, including friends and visiting dignitaries, said she made
Julia Child look like a Taco Bell commercial. No offense to Julia—it was said purely as a tribute to Mom's gourmet skills (as a matter of fact, Julia's was one of Mom's favorite TV shows).

I
have fond childhood memories of traveling to Europe with my parents. The first and last stop had to be Paris, so we could fill up on fine croissants and jams upon entry and take some home for breakfast in America. I'll never forget Dad with his list of delicacies to find in Paris, rushing to Fauchon, the greatest gourmet emporium on earth, to find a specific brand of Russian pickles, or waiting in line for bread at a boulangerie called Poilâne, which twenty years later would be overnighting to waiting customers in the States.

The
French pastries were grand, but I couldn't wait to get to my grandmother's in
Austria to add some weight (in knowledge and body mass) in that country's pastry skills! Picking blueberries in the Alps and then making dumplings was wunderbar! Then we'd head off to Yugoslavia for more family gatherings, where they would hide me when they delivered the freshly roasted suckling pig:
"suckling" signifies a baby still nursing, and because of my love of animals, I could not have borne the sight of it. They didn't have to hide the stuffed pastry dishes of burek and gibanica, which were the cat's meow.
(Actually the first word I learned in Yugoslavian was
muchka,
"cat." I even named my first cat Muchka.)

I
thought this life centered around cooking and eating was great fun, but when I
returned home and told friends about my summer adventures, they never quite got it, nor did their parents understand my "foodish" passion. Lunch to them was sandwiches of white bread and American cheese with mustard and mayonnaise, and try though I might, I never managed to like it. At that time
America's dining repertoire was very limited. Fine dining was considered to be steak and lobster and baked potatoes. (This was before the era of Alice Waters,
the star organic chef at Chez Panisse in Berkeley.) Thai restaurants were just beginning to gain popularity in major cities. Chinese food was the only established ethnic cuisine, and it was associated mainly with the crunchy fried noodle appetizer that you dipped in catsup and mustard.

Was
I always a vegetarian? Not at all, but the way Europeans and most other traditional cultures eat includes lots of freshly prepared vegetables. On those trips to France, not only did I race to the Poilâne, for bread, but I had dreams of slathering it with a cheese of triple cream. It was that cat named
Muchka, along with a rescued dog, that initiated the love for animals that evolved in the formative years of my childhood. On another summer trip to
France, while petting the dairy cows on a family farm, I learned what happens when a male baby is born. That calf gets renamed, and that name is veal! I
returned to junior high school that fall, and for one class we had to do a report on crime. I chose the first topic on the list, "cruelty to animals." This led to reading about the whaling industry and veal production in this country. Talk about eye-opening. For an outlet of expression and to help the animals, I founded and became president of the Friends of
Animals club. I was starting to think seriously about what I was eating, and thereby hangs a tale.

I
went vegetarian at eighteen. I was told by everyone who was really concerned about me to read everything on the topic before making such a decision. They feared I wouldn't get my protein and calcium, and believed that you just plain needed meat juice. Obviously they didn't read the material they suggested I
must; if they had, they would have jumped ship with me and would have never had a worry. Their scare tactics and teasing angered me a bit at first, but I have since softened and am thankful for their advice, which only served to strengthen my argument.

I
loved plants, I loved animals, and I got turned on to yoga by PBS (in the days when you'd say "yoga" and people would say "Oh,
stretching"). At UC Santa Cruz I chose a major in biology and met my housemate Joanie Anderson. Joanie loved to cook French cuisine but went macrobiotic for health reasons and ate mostly vegetarian. It is here that the lights shone down from heaven and the dance began as Joanie introduced me to the crafts of making tempeh and seitan and the history of macrobiotics. Reading about macrobiotics while studying chemistry was really chemistry!

Once
I had gained the knowledge of tempeh and seitan, the vision started solidifying: by adding some great textures and flavors, one could create a menu for a vegetarian restaurant that even the most avid carnivore would enjoy.
Having been warned about the restaurant business, I continued to contemplate other career choices, like pre-med, exercise physiology, marine biology, and botany. While mulling over these life decisions, I found myself cooking quite often, as a kind of stress relief, and it became a great way to make friends away from home. I still couldn't shake off the vegetarian restaurant idea.

There were adventures and business ventures in between this thoughtful time and the final realization of my vision, including a year in Japan, Korea, Thailand,
Malaysia, and Indonesia, and meeting my partner, Ray White (a.k.a. Chief
Whitefeather). Ray got hooked on a tempeh sandwich after being a confirmed meat-and-potatoes restaurateur in L.A. As Ray now says, "Once you learn the right way of eating, and love it, why turn back?" Once craving only steaks, now he only craves Native! Yeah, Ray!

In
1994 we opened the first Native Foods Restaurant in Palm Springs in a breezeway of a shopping center. I knew it would work, because when I was opening the door for the first time, I looked up and saw a dove's nest complete with cooing family—a good omen, I was sure! I had finally created a job for myself working in all the compassionate areas I enjoy: health, animals, saving the environment, and food service.

A
year later we opened a second location in Palm Desert, not too far away but a good distance, to try the "operating more than one store" idea. By the time the phone rang with news of the availability of a Los Angeles location
(Westwood Village), we were ready! Now as this book is being written, our
Mongolian yurt-designed restaurant is being built in Costa Mesa, California
(close to Disneyland—come visit!).

Native
Foods restaurants exist to showcase a progressive, high-quality vegetarian cuisine that is nutritious, organic, compassionate, and delicious. The thought behind the "Native Foods" name is "indigenous to the earth and low on the food chain." Our restaurant does have Native American spirit,
owing to Ray's heritage (he's a Nipmuc from the Aiquonquin Nation), but the menu is eclectic and multicultural. We seek to offer a little bit of everything to everyone. I have long had the desire to encourage Americans to discover and enjoy tempeh and seitan, which, along with the textured soy proteins, are protein-rich alternatives for carnivores or just a fun new food experience for the adventurous. Native Foods is a place where people of all food orientations can get together and have an enjoyable, healthy, and friendly meal.

Since the first Native Foods restaurant began, there have been numerous requests from customers and cooking-class students for a cookbook, so here it is! I hope that you will find this book easy to use learn something new, invite friends for dinner parties, and help educate the world that eating vegetarian can be exciting, exotic, erotic, tasty, and definitely not boring rabbit food. Most of all, have fun and laugh and sing while you are trying the recipes, because that's something you do taste but can't be written in recipes.