Meatless on Madison

There’s a charming, airy feeling inside Cafe Flora, 2901 E. Madison, with all the vast windows, planters full of greenery, and fresh, floral smells you associate with a garden store. For a while, at least, actual garden store, City People’s Mercantile, will continue to operate next door, while Cafe Flora continues to show Seattle how to make a restaurant feel like summer even when there’s an unseasonal downpour. You start by breaking up the inside space into three distinct dining rooms: a garden room, a fountain court, and a multi-level bar area; you use distressed and rustic materials that look like they came from local farms; you make sure the artwork on the walls is cheerful; and you don’t overdo the whole vegetarian thing. Oh, Flora is vegetarian all right, but you don’t feel guilty having lunch there if your regular spot is Bob’s Burger Bar. In fact, more than half the restaurant’s clientele eat meat; they’re not vegetarians at all. Here, you order an Italian burger and you get a grilled patty made from black beans, dressed with basil pesto aioli, sun-dried tomatoes, and arugula moistened with balsamic, all on a soft potato roll. And a “regular” dill pickle, too. You don’t miss the traditional all-beef patty one bit; this is as juicy and complete a taste experience as you can imagine.

Much can be said as well in favor of Cafe Flora’s pizzas. They start with a wheat crust (sorry, celiac sufferers) and top it with grilled asparagus and pickled shallots, or broccoli and grape tomatoes, or just cheese and spinach. 

Four decades ago, a vegetarian restaurant in upstate New York started publishing cookbooks under the byline Moosewood Collective, and set the standard for a different kind of meatless cuisine: careful, thoughtful, an entire dimension beyond dismal, unappetizing  tofu and brown rice. Picking up on the growing vibe, Cafe Flora was started in 1991 by three socially conscious activists who wanted to move “vegetarian” beyond its preachy platform of political correctness. They had a vision of a restaurant that would be “community-based, using local and organic ingredients whenever possible, and fully, ambitiously vegetarian.” David Foecke, Gracie Close, and Scott Glascock all lived in Madison Valley and found their space in an old laundromat. Scott, with a restaurant background, ran the place; he passed away in 2004. A few years later Foecke and Close sold the Cafe to Nat Stratton-Clark, an English gent who had spent a lot of time in kitchens while growing up in California. He moved into the nonprofit sector, and with a business background he quickly took over administrative functions at Cafe Flora. So Stratton-Clark was the logical person to “inherit” the restaurant, which bustles with good cheer all day long. 

What’s striking about Cafe Flora, in addition to the food, is the atmosphere. In addition to the interior spaces, there’s a delightful outdoor patio, now that the good weather has arrived. And a happy hour to put a smile on even the grimmest face of the grumpiest carnivore.

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Funny thing, as you probably know, there’s another vegetarian spot almost directly across the street. That would be Araya’s Place, which occupies the cottage at 2808 E. Madison that once housed a French restaurant called Rover’s. (The meat-eating caveman spirit of Rover’s lives on, of course, at Luc, 2800 E. Madison). Until 1987, as I wrote two years ago, there was not a single restaurant in the Northwest that was both vegan and Thai. Then along came Araya Pudpard, who opened Araya’s Place in the University District. Her daughter Cheryl operates an Araya’s outpost in Hollywood, and her son Fang (along with his wife) runs the Madison Valley property.

The irony, oh the delicious irony. Rover’s, for decades a beacon of fine dining when fine dining implied French cuisine, and French cuisine implied foie gras. Rovers was Seattle’s monument to foie gras. Then, as tastes changed and other opportunities beckoned to Chef-in-the-Hat Thierry Rautureau, Rover’s closed and Luc opened at the corner of Madison and MLK, Loulay opened in the Sheraton Hotel downtown, and the little yellow house in Madison Valley, where Rover’s had welcomed the aspirants to French haute cuisine, Rover’s became Araya’s Place. The setting, in that flowered courtyard, is so welcoming, and the sense of hospitality inside the clean, well-lit house is simply irresistible.

You might want to start with a Tom Yum, a traditional Thai hot-and-sour soup, flavored with lemon grass and lime leaves, studded with mushrooms and tofu. An order serves the entire table. I also enjoyed the avocado curry, which featured mock-chicken seitan, fried tofu, bell peppers and basil in creamy green curry sauce enriched with coconut milk. Save room for at least a bite of dessert; the chocolate bar is outstanding.

Ronald Holden writes about restaurants for Pacific Publishing. His next book, Forking Seattle, comes out this summer.