The Present Moment Cafe

Present Moment Cafe Reviewed in Folio Weekly

August 11-17, 2009 FOLIO WEEKLY p39

RAW DEAL

written by Anne Schindler – (No relation)

YVETTE SCHINDLER

Executive Chef, Present Moment Café

“One of my favorite things to do is eat.”

Seated in a sunlit corner of her organic, vegan, raw-food restaurant, Yvette Schindler talks food like some people eat it: with passion, focus and gusto. She regards food as both spiritual and medicinal, and takes pleasure in exploring all of its symbolic and societal permutations — from the lessons a little girl takes from watching her mother prepare food to the wrenching environmental impacts of the modern-day industrial food complex. But, despite a gift for interpreting and talking about food, Schindler’s passion is eating — and sharing — it.

The fact that her St. Augustine restaurant serves cuisine most people have never eaten, and some willfully misunderstand, doesn’t discourage her. Her goal is not to convince people of the benefits of eating raw, but to seduce them with the idea.

“I didn’t just want to open a restaurant. I’d done that,” says Schindler, who ran a macrobiotic restaurant in Santa Fe, N.M., for four years, among other culinary endeavors. “It had to be really good. It had to be delicious.”

The concept behind the raw food movement is that the enzymes contained in whole foods are physically, even psychologically transformative. Those enzymes are destroyed when food is cooked or even heated above 130 degrees. In order to preserve the socalled “life force” of the food, raw food devotees eat only meals prepared with uncooked fruits and vegetables.

The diet can seem extreme, especially to a culture raised on processed foods. Even Schindler admits she initially found the rawfood mantra somewhat radical. But after “going raw” for a three-month trial, Schindler says, she was a believer. For one, her longtime arthritis disappeared. And she was suffused with a feeling of joy and empathy that she describes as “a high — an altered consciousness.”

Schindler and her son Nathan were so transformed by the diet, they decided to open a restaurant to share that they’d learned. Before doing so, Schindler visited every raw-food restaurant she could find on both coasts. She also trained alongside gourmet raw-food gourmet chef Chad Sarno, who’s been featured in magazines from GQ to Cosmo.

The café’s menu reflects Schindler’s international palate, as well as her passion for gourmet preparation. Among her favorites items are the Sunlight Burger ($12, made from walnuts, sunflower seeds, almonds, carrots and zucchini, and topped with vegan “provolone” and caramelized onions) and the Creamy White

Truffle Pesto Pasta ($11, made from zucchini pasta, sun-dried tomatoes and pine nuts.) The menu also features Pad Thai, tacos, even a Brownie Sunday (prepared with a coconut base and cashew vanilla “ice cream”).

“I don’t want people to feel like, ‘I gotta go eat this food because it’s healthy,” she says. “I want them to come because it makes them feel good to eat it.” Though Schindler is a dedicated raw foodie, she’s not rigid. Her diet is about “95 percent raw,” and she reserves that remaining 5 percent for those situations when she

can’t avoid conventional food. If her aunt offers her a homemade chocolate chip cookie, she says, or if someone prepares her a meal in their home, she won’t refuse. Food is, above all, an expression of love, she says.

For Northeast Florida, Schindler’s love of eating — and feeding — is everyone’s gain.

Anne Schindler

(No relation)