Vegan Guide to Michelin Restaurants: Gauthier, Soho

     The very generous people over at Purfit gave me a huge container of their chocolate Meal Replacement Shake to try, and I must say I really like it. I have been obsessed with Sunwarrior Raw Chocolate protein powder for a few years now, but Purfit has posed a surprisingly successful contender. I would definitely buy this in the future.
      For each serving of 37g (or a ‘scoop’, but my container didn’t include a scoop so I used the Sunwarrior one), you get 140 calories, 5g fat, and 14g protein, plus at least 100% of your daily vitamin A, C, B6, B12, and other vitamins. The chocolate taste is the best I’ve found in any protein powder, from Sunwarrior to Vega to Plantfusion. It’s a little chalky, as they all are, but it tastes the most like chocolate milk and not like chocolate-flavored protein. So that’s good! 

        I tried Purfit in several forms in order to get a complete picture. First, I tried Purfit’s recommended recipe of “Chocolate Twist”, which is the powder mixed with water and a tiny bit of vanilla extract. I just blended the following ingredients in a small blender.

CHOCOLATE TWIST

• 1 serving Purfit
• 1 cup water
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

     This simple recipe is what sold me on the product. I never drink protein powder straight with water; I always add it to my morning smoothies. The thought of having other powders plain grosses me out. But this tasted like chocolate milk! I was shocked, and delighted. I’ll definitely be getting Purfit out when I want a chocolate milk fix. 

        Next, I tried it in my favorite green smoothie recipe instead of my usual Sunwarrior protein. My secret to green smoothies is to freeze all of the components, including the greens. Frozen greens blend and disintegrate more easily. Freezing is made simpler with prewashed and bagged greens, like the ones from Trader Joe’s. This is roughly what I do:

MY FAVORITE GREEN SMOOTHIE

• 2 cups frozen kale (squish it into the blender with your hands and you can fit more)
• 1 cup frozen rainbow chard
• 1 cup frozen spinach
• 1/2 cup frozen collards
• 1 frozen banana
• 1/2 cup frozen mixed berries
• 1/2 cup frozen pineapple
• 1 scoop chocolate protein powder

        Fill the blender with water first, about 2 cups. Blend until really really smooth. It makes a ton, so I like to freeze the extras in single-serve Mason jars to take to work on days I have less time. 
       My favorite smoothie was just as great with Purfit. The chocolate was a bit more pronounced but I like that. The strange thing was, I felt way fuller much later in the day than I normally do. I was barely hungry for dinner after having this for my first meal. I don’t necessarily like that, but for those of you who need help staying full between meals, I recommend giving this a try!  

         Lastly, I tried to make my standard Vitamix ice cream/water ice with Purfit taking the place of some of the cocoa powder. A high-speed blender is necessary for this recipe, I’m sorry to say! 

     Thank you so much to the people of Purfit for letting me try your product. I am so excited to say that I honestly enjoyed it and am looking forward to adding it to my regular lineup of protein powders. I hope you readers enjoy my recipes and enjoy Purfit if you decide to buy it! 

    As a vegan, I don’t feel much incentive to follow the fancy world of gourmet-level dining, what with their Zagat ratings and Michelin stars and whatever other rankings people in that spectrum of dining covet. In fact, there was a time when all I knew about Michelin stars came from the movie “Ratatouille”. (Great film.) I’m sure it’s interesting to some people, but it sounded odd to rank something as subjective as good food. Moreover, aside from the ratatouille, the honored restaurants and their prize dishes are pretty much the opposite of vegan-friendly. Why would I ever want to go to a restaurant that was lauded for its foie gras, or thought it was commendable to do weird things to all kinds of animals? Nope.
However, my boyfriend is into all of that, and while he goes to those places with friends, I felt a little bad that he couldn’t enjoy these places with me. I’m fun company. But then we were planning a trip to Chicago, and he wanted to go to Alinea. He wanted to go there BAD. So bad, in fact, that he scoured the internet trying to find something that said they could accommodate a vegan. Luckily, he didn’t have to search too long, thanks to the lovely Lagusta, who in 2009 blogged about the vegan menu at Alinea. That’s right – anyone can request a vegan menu at a freaking top world restaurant with freaking THREE MICHELIN STARS. I was in! (I mean, I wasn’t paying. Of course I was in.)

        Our seating area was really dark, so the pictures aren’t great, but there is a pretty amazing video at the end showing the epic final dessert. I’ll do my best to remember what we had, but mostly it’s just all a blur of happiness to the point of near-comatose mind-blowingness.

     How cool is this! These little bites were incredible. See that white pillar in the upper left corner? It was like sweet delicious chalk. I don’t know what they freeze-dried to make it, but it blew my mind. So many little fried vegetables, purees and gels of wonderment. I’m obsessed. Also, this entire plate is vegan! Molecular gastronomy is so vegan friendly, because it’s so weird, I guess.
And then it just continued in its amazingness. The next two dishes were like ravioli, already on a spoon. Just one piece (raviolo, then), but it’s all you need. These bites, especially the one on the right, exploded with the most perfectly matched flavors I’ve ever encountered.

    The final savory dish (well, at least that I took a picture of! There was so much more! But I didn’t have a blog yet, so you can’t be mad) was this wooden slab of mushrooms, grain crumbs? orange? and foam that evoked a lovely meal in a remote log cabin, probably with Ron Swanson if he ever cooked more than meat. I can’t describe how excited I was for a decent amount of foam, because pretty much all I knew about molecular gastronomy going in was the use of foams.

    How good does that look! It tasted even better, obviously, with the mushrooms, foams, spiced crumbles, and that crispy green leaf blending together so well it was like it was sponsored by Vitamix. Such a great finish.

     I loved this dessert. I loved that you could drink the liquid inside, which was light and refreshing and not too sweet. On the dish, there was a sesame-laden blob, a fruity red blob, and this blob of rice pudding, made with rice milk, that was superb. In fact, my boyfriend, who got the regular omnivore menu, got a rice pudding that he said was yogurt-y and tart, and not as good as mine. He even suggested to the staff that the vegan version replace the regular one, because it was that much better!

     The final dessert was just epic. A team of waitstaff removed everything from our table, rearranged the table, chairs, and us, and covered the table with a silicon mat. Then came the head chef, alerting us, “You’ll probably want to take a video of this.” Thanks to him, here is the video for your envy-filled pleasure. You can kind of hear him explaining what the purees are, what the liquid nitrogen-spewing ball is holding, and what the chocolate crumbles are made of. It’s mostly like insane astronaut style ice cream but much better.

     Dinner at Alinea was without a doubt the most…the most. Like Jack Donaghy in college, it’s getting voted just ‘most.’ If you ever have the opportunity to eat here, do it. It’s mad expensive, and it’s hard to say it’s worth it when it costs more than, like, rent, but if you can swing it, it’s absolutely worth it. I’m not even going to do my usual little roundup of water/service/food/bathroom because obviously this was beyond known ranges. Amazing!