Restaurant Review: Living Kitchen

As promised, I have some restaurant reviews to show you now that I'm finished with my trip to Raleigh! Raleigh is a remarkably vegan-friendly town. I'm starting with the place I ate most often, Living Kitchen. (I ate there a lot because it was directly across the street from my hotel and it was totally vegan--not many restaurants are completely vegan in Raleigh, though many are very friendly to vegans.)

Breakfast #1:

This hot chocolate, made with their homemade coconut milk, was delightful. I don't often get hot chocolate these days (I used to make it a lot with those just-add-water packets in my omnivore days, and now more often than not I just have hot herbal tea), so this was a real treat.

They call this the "Biblical Breakfast": local bread spread with three different nut butters (almond, peanut, and coconut) and topped with fresh fruit, fig preserves, and maple syrup. There was some sort of microgreen garnish. This was every bit as good as it looked.

Dinner #1:

This ginger ale was not carbonated and it was extremely spicy. I had a hard time finishing it.

This was the pimento cheese sandwich with a side of roasted sweet potatoes. Honestly, this was just depressing, and nothing like pimento cheese (a southern staple, and something I once deeply loved--I still need to try veganizing my own pimento cheese). It, like the ginger ale, was really spicy, and so together it was rough going. So after this somewhat sad meal, I decided I needed dessert. Fortunately, it did not disappoint.

They call this turtle "cake," but it's really a caramel-chocolate pie with a nut crust. It's pretty amazing. I suspect it involves tofu and melted chocolate for the filling, but just because something is simple doesn't mean it isn't decadent! The dessert rescued my hopes for this place.

Breakfast #2:

Avocado toast. This is hard to mess up; I would have preferred sliced tomato to halved grape tomatoes but this was fine. And they get several points for presentation! So pretty!

Dinner #2:

This was kale lemonade, and I hated it. It was a very weird flavor and not at all sweet or really even lemony.

After the kale lemonade, I was pretty unhappy to get this manicotti. Put bluntly, this just wasn't enough calories to count as more than a snack. It was also cold, which was a shock to me--I wasn't expecting that. But the cashew ricotta filling was nice, and would have been amazing if served warm with pasta.

So I needed dessert again.

This carrot "cake" (again, pie, I don't know why they keep calling these things cake) was pretty great, except that all of a sudden toward the end I ran into a clump of raisins. Raisins were unadvertised on the menu for this item. I'm glad they clumped themselves up where they were easy to avoid--I'm afraid I never made easy peace with raisins, but especially not in dessert--but I think someone hoping for raisins would be less thrilled about that.

General thoughts: The food was hit or miss at the Living Kitchen, but if you are going to eat there, I recommend sticking to hot drinks, dessert, and stuff on toast for breakfast, especially the Biblical Breakfast. This is a place that seems to embrace a "health" food idea of veganism, often with bewildering results. Beyond the food itself, service was incredibly slow and servers showed absolutely no inclination to hurry; in one case I saw the server stop at another table unbidden, while holding my breakfast, and have a long chat while I started hungrily at it. I wanted this place to be so much more than it was and I gave it a lot of chances, but in the end, it only gets 3/5.