Breaking Spelt Bread with Vegans at Peace Food on Amsterdam

        The Upper West Side’s roomy and embracing new vegan retreat, Peacefood Cafe on Amsterdam, is not as serene as partner/veganologist Eric Yu means it to be. Locals stumble in demanding milk in their coffee only to decamp in puzzled disappointment. Soy milk? Rice milk? Almond milk? Forget it. A quartet of young women, settled dipping into Everests of salad at a round in the big front window, don’t mind being photographed.

        Impulsively I start telling them the story of a vegan I know who suddenly found herself  craving eggs and weeks later surrenders to fish.  I am cut off sharply. “We prefer not to hear about animals while we’re eating,” one announces. Obviously there is a whole other etiquette that must be learned if you’re hanging out with people who have sworn off eating anything human and that includes eggs, milk and cheese.

        I’m here carrying a clip of FloFab’s encouraging ode in the Times to the shop’s “sophistication.” “You don’t need Birkenstocks,” she writes. My guy and I are sharing what the menu calls  “the other Caesar” (obviously our customary carnivorean Caesar with its egg and anchovy would be a sacrilege here where near-bacon-like smoked tempah, red onions and tasteless tomatoes don’t quite make up the difference.)  Even so, the entree size salad ($9) with its spelt rye croutons is good enough that the two of us are polishing it off.

        What is endearing about Peacefood, besides the bakery’s range of biscuits, cookies and old-fashioned looking layer cakes, is the amiable sweetness of our waiter (are vegans more gentle or did he just arrive from Kansas?), and the energy and missionary zeal of alpha partner Eric Yu. He’s everywhere in his orange newsboy cap, like a Disney elf, plucking muffins and scones from the display, jollying and explaining the mission.  It’s about peace, obviously, an untroubled existence for all living creatures and good health whether you dig it or not. No eggs, refined flours or sugar pollute his bakings. He blends juices that detox and cure a hangover and brews Brazilian nut chai tea, squeezing the nuts himself. That must be made daily, he explains, and is extremely labor intensive. Yes, he serves real espresso but your cappuccino will be foamed with soy milk.

        Infidels that we are to the core, both of us are digging this pleasant time-out in our lives of excess. I really like my sandwich: roasted and mashed Japanese pumpkin with vegan goat cheese and ground walnuts on marvelous toasted spelt rye, oozing caramelized onions that I am recapturing with my finger. And the Road Food Warrior, normally a pizza savant, is content to sip his green lemonade and polish off the house’s not-exactly-pizza-like flatbread frisbee with seasonal veggies – broccoli and cauliflower, zucchini and yellow squash, carrots and a pallid tomato sauce. Probably we should have tried the spicy chickpea fries and the mushroom dumplings Flo singled out.

         Now I get to check out the sweets department for dessert. So many choices. I want to try a dozen or so, cherry velvet cake, apricot almond biscuits, macaroons, mocha truffle – after all, “It’s My Job” – but caution prevails. I would not repeat the apple galette in its tough pastry casing but definitely recommend the mini-brownie (just 99 cents) and the chocolate chip cookie. And you might want to stop if only for the anthropological adventure. 460 Amsterdam Avenue at 82nd Street. 212 362 2266 Everyday 9 am to 10 pm.

Click here to return to the Short Order Archive