It is easy to feel lumpy and inadequate here in Malibu Canyon, at the sunny, breezy home of Julie Piatt and Rich Roll, the couple behind a recent cookbook and lifestyle guide called “The Plantpower Way.”
Roll, who is 48 but looks as if he could still compete on the Stanford swim team, talked about his workout routine and how abandoning meat and milk helped return him to a state of godlike health. “Kicking dairy was brutal,” he said. “That’s like getting off OxyContin.”
Piatt, who also goes by her spiritual name, SriMati, was all flared pants and dark flowing hair as she crisped up veggie burgers in a pan. She was happy to reveal her age; people don’t believe her anyway. “I’m 53,” she said. “It’s my nonalcoholic, meditative, yogic, vegan lifestyle.”
Even their children seemed to be on board. Piatt put a mountainous platter of nachos at the center of the dining table, and the four of them, ages 8 to 20, ravenously dug in, with no grousing about the absence of sour cream and Monterey Jack. “Is everyone good?” Piatt asked. “Does anyone want more cashew cheese?”
The scene looked exactly like a page out of “The Plantpower Way,” with Pacific Coast light streaming through the windows of a modernist house so striking that Roll rents it out for movies and commercials. “It’s not a bad tribe to be in,” said Andrew Pasquella, an artist and friend who lives in an Airstream trailer on the property.
And that’s precisely the point: Roll and Piatt are vegans, and they’re on a mission to let people know that enlisting with their tribe doesn’t have to feel like being trapped in a fragrant tent with “the dreadlocked hippie who is kicking the Hacky Sack,” as Roll put it.
Veganism has been edging into the mainstream for years now, coaxed along by superstar believers like Bill Clinton and Beyoncé. But lately, as plant-based eating has blossomed and gained followers, influential vegans are laboring to supplant its dowdy, spartan image with a new look: glamorous, prosperous, sexy and epidermally beaming with health.
The evidence is bountiful — at restaurants on both coasts and in cookbooks, on blogs and throughout social media. “Being a vegan has crossed over into fashion territory,” said Kerry Diamond, the editor of Yahoo Food and the editorial director of Cherry Bombe magazine. Decades back “there was nothing chic about it,” she said. “Now it’s become a thing.”
Roll, who also wrote the best-selling “Finding Ultra,” about his midlife search for truth and health while switching to a vegan diet and pushing himself to compete in grueling athletic challenges, acknowledges that the dreamy visuals in “The Plantpower Way” are meant to give vegan living a more vogue-ish spin.
“It was a very conscious effort to kind of counterprogram,” he said. “Our whole idea was to present this lifestyle in an aspirational and modern way. We want to present it in a way that looks appealing, as opposed to deprivation-oriented.” Or as Piatt described it, “There’s no body odor coming off the pages.”
People have adopted veganism for virtuous reasons, but vanity plays an undeniable role as well. It’s not uncommon to hear vegans mooning over “the glow,” an irresistible incandescence that starts to emanate from within after a few weeks or months of eating only plants. (To cite one example: “The Oh She Glows Cookbook.”)
“There are definitely some really nice superficial benefits to the whole thing,” said popular British blogger Ella Woodward, 24, whose book “Deliciously Ella” chronicles her success in conquering health problems with a plant-oriented (she eschews the V-word) regimen. “My skin is so much cleaner and clearer.”
Vegan cooking itself has gone through a stark transformation, and so has the way it is sold: In some coastal pockets, at least, stern sermons have been replaced by the seductive allure of la dolce vita. Nonvegans are welcomed, not shunned. “The message has changed,” said Kathy Freston, an author and vegan proponent. “And we have moved away from that old dogma.”
Whether practiced by straightedge punk bands crossing the country in a van or animal-rights activists gathering for a rally, the embryonic incarnation of veganism usually came with a touch of puritanical renunciation. Vegan America remained a colorless, flavor-averse realm of microwaved bean burritos and tofu strips layered like paving stones over desiccated pebbles of brown rice, if not the “mashed yeast” choked down by Woody Allen in “Annie Hall.”
“That’s still what people think of when they think of vegan food,” said musician Moby, 50, who has been a vegan for 28 years. But lately he has been immersed in the writing of chefs like Thomas Keller and Alice Waters as he gears up for the November opening of Little Pine, a vegan restaurant he is opening in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles. Moby wants it to be, he said, “a wonderful restaurant even when judged by conventional standards.”
Vegan glam is on full display at Crossroads, a restaurant on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles, where this month servers grandly hauled to tables a gleaming “seafood tower” that looked like something Orson Welles would order at an Old Hollywood nightclub. Instead of lobster, it had lobster mushrooms; in place of calamari, sustainably harvested hearts of palm. And was that oysters Rockefeller? No, it was an artichoke leaf cradling a shiitake mushroom that had been poached in olive oil and covered with spinach and bread crumbs.
Tal Ronnen, the chef and an owner of Crossroads, invented the tower with Scot Jones, the restaurant’s executive chef; they have both cooked for the pioneeringly vegan rock star Chrissie Hynde.
The extravagant tower, Ronnen said, is an example of “creating things that people don’t think you can have in the plant-based world,” just as Crossroads itself, with its plush banquettes and long bar, steers clear of that “traditional vegetarian restaurant vibe with bamboo floors and loud juicers in the background,” Ronnen said. It has more in common with an established celebrity magnet like Dan Tana’s than with Mountain Mama’s House of Sprouts.
In fact, Crossroads has become such a draw for boldface names that the restaurant wound up building its own kitted-out garage behind the kitchen so celebrities can pull in and enter the restaurant without being flash-mobbed by paparazzi.
“These guys really appreciate it,” said Ronnen, whose latest cookbook, “Crossroads: Extraordinary Recipes From the Restaurant That Is Reinventing Vegan Cuisine,” contains blurbs from Clinton, Paul McCartney, chef Roy Choi and Jay Z. “I think that’s really taking care of customers and people who want to have privacy.”
It’s as if vegans collectively realized that you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, or at least that you spread the message more easily when you don’t start preaching about how eating honey represents an exploitation of bees. Vegans like Ronnen, Piatt and Roll remain highly fluent in the political arguments for plant-based eating, but they’re less likely to be sanctimonious about it, Ronnen said.
And nonvegans, in turn, seem less likely to be dismissive. Chad Sarno, a 39-year-old chef and culinary educator in Austin, Texas, remembers a time when you’d step into a restaurant and “you would say the vegan word and the chef would look at you like you had three heads and just got off the commune.” Now, with influential nonvegan chefs like David Kinch and Alain Passard rhapsodizing about the glory of vegetables, the dialogue has shifted. “Plants are so sexy,” Sarno said.
A few decades back it would have been hard to conceive of Avant Garden, which opened days ago in New York City’s East Village, with chef Andrew D’Ambrosi in the kitchen whipping up dishes like potato cannelloni with pinenut ricotta, arugula pesto and eggplant.
“I just want to do a really nice, upscale vegan restaurant that breaks the mold of what people think vegan restaurants are,” said Ravi DeRossi, the owner of Avant Garden and the entrepreneur behind New York spots like Bergen Hill and Amor y Amargo.
In New York, diners can easily opt to go fully vegan at Superiority Burger, Dimes and the Butcher’s Daughter. There is a steady line out the door during lunchtime at By Chloe, where chef Chloe Coscarelli, at 27 already the author of several cookbooks, stresses that her veggie burgers and quinoa taco salads will not leave diners hungrily chomping on their own knuckles. “I want to be normal,” she said, and By Chloe’s alluring and clever presence on Instagram suggests that it has no intention of sulking in the margins.
“We didn’t want it to scream vegan, we wanted it to scream food and fun and delicious,” Coscarelli said. “Why do we have to make it a downer to be in here?”
Indeed, plenty of websites and cookbooks (as well as Los Angeles canteens like Café Gratitude) convey the impression that veganism is more like the beautiful-people soiree we all wish we’d been invited to, the one where Karlie Kloss and Jared Leto sparkle amid the cold-pressed cocktails and raw-beet canapés.
“The Plantpower Way,” “Deliciously Ella,” “My New Roots” and “Lookbook Cookbook” take arguments about maximizing health, saving the environment and protecting animals a step further, suggesting that veganism also happens to make you, well, incredibly hot.
“It’s subversive, in a sense,” said Diamond, of Yahoo Food. “Being a vegan is still a political act in America. But having all these beautiful people rebelling in this way is really compelling.”
Or not.
That shiny happy vegan perfection has prompted a few jabs. Even Amanda Cohen, the New York chef whose Dirt Candy restaurant was way ahead of the curve in celebrating vegetables, worries about the potential faddishness of the movement. “You really want to hope it’s not a trend,” she said. “Is vegan the new bone broth?”
All that swooning over “the glow” can lead to eye-rolls from those without the time and money to achieve it. “It’s a big commitment to get that glow,” Cohen said. “It’s not cheap. It’s not for the peasants.”
Roll, of “The Plantpower Way,” has felt the criticism himself. “One Amazon reviewer said, ‘You’ll never be as perfect as they are,'” he recalled. “That broke my heart. Somebody drew that conclusion, which was the opposite of what I’m trying to present.”
“People see the house and it’s easy to make a judgment,” Roll went on. “The reality behind it is far more complicated.” Shedding work as an entertainment lawyer means that Roll doesn’t have the revenue stream he once lapped up; money has been tight, and for a while the family thought they would have to move.
These vegans may look as if they have everything figured out, but getting there can be a long process. As the Plantpower family gathered for lunch at the long table, Piatt marveled at recollections of her youth in Alaska, where her father used to drag home wild game. “I remember eating bear once, as a child,” she said.
Jaya, her youngest daughter, looked up with eyes wide. “Wait, Mommy, you ate a bear?” she asked.
“It was when I was a kid,” Piatt replied. “I didn’t understand yet.”
Vegan Mexican Cacao Brownies
Time: 50 minutes
Yield: 16 brownies
Ingredients
3 tablespoons/14 grams ground flaxseed
Coconut oil, for greasing pan
3/4 cup/85 grams garbanzo flour
1/2 cup/35 grams natural cacao powder
1/4 cup/28 grams tapioca flour
1 teaspoon cinnamon
3/4 teaspoon xanthan gum
1/2 teaspoon fine sea salt
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1 cup/112 grams almond meal
1 (3 1/2-ounce/100-gram) bar high-quality chile-infused vegan dark chocolate, coarsely chopped
1 1/4 cups/245 grams cane sugar
1 cup plus 2 tablespoons/252 grams vegan butter (preferably Earth Balance)
1/2 cup/118 milliliters unsweetened almond milk, more as needed
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1 (9-ounce/255-gram) bag vegan chocolate chips
Preparation
1. In a small bowl, whisk together the ground flaxseed and 6 tablespoons (89 milliliters) water until mixture has an egg-like consistency. Set aside.
2. Heat oven to 350 degrees. Lightly oil the bottom and sides of a 9-inch-square pan with coconut oil. Line the bottom of the pan with parchment paper. Set aside.
3. In a large bowl, sift together garbanzo flour, cacao powder, tapioca flour, cinnamon, xanthan gum, sea salt and baking soda. Add almond meal and stir until fully incorporated.
4. In a clean, dry metal bowl set over a pan of barely simmering water, melt chile-infused dark chocolate, stirring until smooth. Remove from heat and set aside to cool.
5. Whisk the flaxseed “egg” again, then place in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment. Add sugar, vegan butter, almond milk and vanilla and stir on low. Gradually increase speed to medium-high and continue beating until mixture is fully combined and mostly smooth, 5 to 7 minutes. Add the melted chocolate and beat for 15 seconds.
6. Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and fold with a rubber spatula until fully combined and streak-free. The batter should be thick and gooey, but if it’s too dry, add additional almond milk, 1 tablespoon at a time, to loosen. Fold about 3/4 of the chocolate chips into the batter, then spread it evenly in the prepared pan. Sprinkle the top with the remaining chocolate chips.
7. Bake until a fork inserted in the center of the brownies comes out mostly clean, about 30 minutes; do not overcook. Transfer the pan to a rack and cool to room temperature.
Tip
You can omit the cinnamon and swap the chocolate chili bar for a mint dark chocolate bar instead for a fresh twist.
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