To err is excellent and to specialize is divine.
To really appreciate a vegetarian restaurant, it's best to go after a fierce bout of meat eating. I mean it. This is akin to jumping in the cold plunge after 20 minutes in the sweat of a hot sauna. The contrast highlights appreciation for each extreme all the more. In my house, the week before Super Bowl Sunday was filled with bacon and eggs, hot Italian sausage, chili. On Sunday, it was a shrimp etouffee my
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husband cooked for the game, made with a thick roux and spicy with jalapenos. Friends brought over greens sautéed in cider vinegar and bacon, smoked sausage, and a moist chocolate and cherry double-frosted cake that had collapsed on its tray and been transplanted simply, hedonistically, into a bowl. This was one of those mistakes that turned glorious. Cake, I've decided, should always be served in a bowl, quite mangled so the frosting is dispersed throughout and each bite contains a goodly amount. Some of us, ahem, ate directly out of the big bowl, the super bowl we called it, with the biggest spoons we could find.
Cake, of course, isn't meat but epitomizes the kind of eating we had done prior to setting foot in Annapurna, the new vegetarian restaurant addition to Solana Center on West Alameda. We hadn't really been thinking about cholesterol, let alone the abundance of gluten in our diets, or refined flour, all concerns at Annapurna. On the counter near the bottles of ayurvedic botanicals are gluten-free, vegan cardamom cookies and carob chip banana bread; on each table is a card explaining the benefits of a gluten-free diet. Such a preoccupation with healthy food is the kind of thing that normally makes me 1) roll my eyes and, 2) flee in horror, but let me tell you the chefs at the Annapurna are also concerned with taste, and in that category they really didn't disappoint. My husband had the lunch special ($9.95), which was a superbly flavored dal soup, basmati rice, and a mix of cauliflower and kale spiced with a mild curry, heavy on the fennel. I chose the Masala Dosa ($9.25), a spicy mixture of carrots, greens, broccoli and other veggies wrapped in a crispy crepe. The crepe
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was unusually tangy and made with rice and urad dal flour. We also shared Pakora ($4.95), sweet potato slices covered in a chickpea batter and fried, served with a sweet tamarind chutney.
On our way to Annapurna, my husband, who gets a bit prickly around the subject of food, had been grumbling that a strictly vegetarian restaurant isn't really a democratically principled place. Meat restaurants, he said, offer vegetarian dishes. Not always true, I countered, and they're often not good when they do, but OK, absolutely no meat has a certain fascist tilt. And then we went, we ate, he loved it. I've begun to think that really good things come in two instances: when you specialize, and when you make a mistake.