Once you walk in the door, you may not know it but you’ve entered another world- the raw world. It looks like earth, it sounds like earth but oh, it’s not… Staffed by almost..almost annoyingly positive people, these dudes and dude-ettes really walk their talk- the raw food way! While you may find yourself snapping cynical just to balance all this quirky happiness, Cafe Gratitude really is a mood lifter, if a bit heavy on the New Age mojo.

While I love going to eat here, I think it is important to understand that raw food is it’s own very particular type of cuisine and just can’t be compared to cooked food.
That being said, the raw meals here are good, with some dishes being shockingly tasty considering what is or.. isn’t in them.

Service note: happy they are…fast they are not!
They are especially slow with take out, so if you are ordering to pick up, get ready to wait.

NUT ALLERGIC PEOPLE – BEWARE! Many of their dishes, and all of the cheeses, are made with lots raw, soaked organic nuts. Most of these nut heavy dishes are very hard to digest and will stay in your stomach in a heavy congeled ball even hours after the meal. So if you are not used to digesting large amounts of nuts, (and unless you’re a squirrel or a raw foodist -you’re not ) be wary of ordering any meal that has nuts or seeds as the main ingredient.

Another dietary note to be concisous of is that these are NOT calorie light dishes.
To make up for taste and low protein content, a raw food diet tends to be heavy on nuts, salt and oil. While all the nuts, salt and oil used at Cafe Gratitude is organic and of the highest quality, there is often a lot of it. But fear not, they are ever helpful and will leave off oily dressings or suggest a low fat dish if you are watching your weight.

A big part of ‘eating raw’ is learning how to combine foods, something that unfortunately, Cafe Gratitude doesn’t do that well. Seasoned raw foodists will have to request substitutions when they order but the rest of us really won’t notice.

An unexpected surprise is their raw, cold pressed, organic expresso. Apparently, it is so good it’s almost touching the divine and has many non-raw foodists totally addicted and swinging by every week to pick up their organic caffeine fix. A little goes a long way, so get some of this super rocket fuel for your programming friends and save another soul from slumming at Starbucks.

Good dishes-
Chocolate pudding- very yummy, tastes just like the real thing but richer.
Faux Miso soup- also very good and warm but make sure to ask for the shitake mushrooms and sea veggies- it’s too plain without them.
Live pizza- as long as you close your eyes, it tastes surprisingly like the real thing, but very filling- you won’t be able to finish it.
Thai noodle- does not taste like that Thai place down the street, but is good as it’s own dish.

Bad dishes- Live sun burger- heavy and dry.
Live fudge and live chocolate truffles- totally gross. My raw friends disagree with me on this, but these nasty brown nuggets remind me of those cardboard flavored carob thingys that my mom kept bringing home in the 80’s and never got eaten. They are not only cement dry but they are stuffed to bursting with dates. As well as date flavor, date sugar and eau de date essence. ( I have since found out that dates are like crack to raw food people. And no, I don’t know why.)

So do not believe the beaming dread-locked girl who tells you how great the truffles are.
Run. Run away fast.

Cafe Gratitude is a fun place and eating there is definitely an experience worth having. It’s like being back in time at the height of hippy love-sixties, just repackaged for the new millenuim. For that unique expierence alone, it is worth it to go- at least once, just for the atomosphere that harkens back to what I imagine the Haight was like at it’s prime. Even if the idea of raw food goes against every fine food belief you have ever had -go-soak in the eco-friendly vibe, get a coconut smoothie, sit back and be, man…. just be. :)

Rainbow note: are you kidding?! Of course it’s gay friendly here! – It’s so gay friendly that some of your straight friends will probably experiment after a few hours of hanging out at Cafe Gratitude- it’s THAT liberal and accepting. :)

For a meatatarian, I really like Cafe Gratitude. The cheesiness of the nouveau hippie food names, and the waiters who repeat back “you are blessed” when you order “I am blessed,” is palatable because the place is just infused with a good-natured feeling, making it impossible to be jaded and scornful.

The food, considering it’s all live and raw and vegan, is pretty good. They make bread and crusts out of ground-up grains, “meat” out of the same ground-up grain mixture, good veggie burgers, and a nice soy chai. As you might imagine, when you use the same base ingredients for every dish, the dishes become nearly indistinguishable from each other. But it doesn’t mean they aren’t tasty.

Since I’m not a vegan or even a vegetarian in real life, I won’t come here every week; but still, it’s nice to know that you can survive (nay, thrive!) on pretty tasty raw, vegan food.

You probably wouldn’t think that organic, vegan, mostly raw food would be that good, but you’d be wrong. Like, big-time wrong. The food here is awesome, particularly the savory Bhutan rice breakfast thingy. I wasn’t overly thrilled with the key lime pie I had for lunch the day before (yes, I went twice in two days), because it was kind of oily. I think chocolate might be a better bet, as my mocha was muy delicious. The dish names are fun, too.