Passion Points: Food/Wine
Raw and Healthy: Q&A with Sarma Melngailis Text Size A A A
The raw food movement has been around for years—remember the episode in Sex and the City, in which the girls suffer through a meal of wheatgrass shots because Samantha has a crush on the waiter?—but recently, it has morphed into something much more accessible, refined and sophisticated. Restaurateur, chef and entrepreneur Sarma Melngailis has been at the forefront of this shift. At Pure Food & Wine, her raw vegan restaurant in Manhattan’s Gramercy district, the menu abounds with innovative dishes that are as delicious as they are beautifully prepared and the crowd mingling in the chic deep red dining room is a hip mix. “It’s true that more and more people defy the stereotyped look formerly associated with being vegan,” says Melngailis, who began her career in finance but shifted into the culinary world in the late 1990s, by studying at the French Culinary Institute, and has never looked back. “For instance, I know a lot of men who eat raw who are hardly the unshaven, crunchy vegan-looking type, but rather guys in suits.”
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