Raw Bento

It is incredible how the universe works her mysterious ways. Would you believe that the person who inspired me to go raw was actually at Quintessence at the same time as me?

I’d actually heard of the raw food diet two years ago but I read very dry articles on it and filed it into the drawer of “Things that exist but only crazy people do them”.

But I stumbled upon Gala Darling, a fashion blog, over a year ago and I loved her writing so much, I slowly read through her archives. In one of her posts, she had a coaching session with one of my (now) role models, Karen Knowler, aka The Raw Food Coach. They made raw food sound so easy and do-able that I went shopping for fruit, veggies, and nuts the very next day and made my first raw meal.

So Gala said some time ago she is not vegan and has sort of disassociated herself from raw by talking about other types of food she’s been noshing on (I felt it was a shame, really), but for readers who are curious (and this makes me feel a mite weird and stalker-ish), she ordered a raw meal to go at Quintessence. But you know, one shouldn’t think about putting others in well-defined boxes and she probably has two feet in separate boats, as many of us do.

I didn’t say hi but I sure did think about it. I felt shy approaching her and she looked like she just popped out to the shops to get something to eat and run errands. I imagined how I would feel if someone suddenly sprang themselves on me while I was quietly going my way — so I just sat in my seat and peeked at her.

But what I mostly thought about was how serendipitous it was to “bump” into the very person whose podcast pushed me over the edge from SAD to raw. Wow. “It’s a sign,” I murmured to myself. A sign of what, I don’t know, but what a crazy coincidence.

Moving onto the food, this is what I had at the raw café:

The Thai coconut soup was flavourful but my only complaint was it was ice cold and the chilly autumn weather didn’t make it a very favourable choice. I would’ve appreciated this more in summer.

The ravioli was stuffed with a walnut pesto and was so rich that I couldn’t finish the meal. I thought it tasted great but it was too heavy on the olive oil. This time I didn’t have a raw dessert which was a real shame because they all sounded so droolicious on the menu…I’ll be back again soon, I hope…

If you missed my first review on Quintessence, you can read it here.