To Live and Eat in L.A. – A Vegan Food Photo Blog

Mmmm… mmmm… M Cafe de Chaya. “Contemporary Macrobiotic Cuisine featuring balanced, nutritious, creative cooking … prepared fresh daily, using only the finest ingredients without any refined sugars, eggs, dairy, red meat or poultry” never tasted soooo good.

This here is the Seitan Katsu Bowl: “crispy seitan cutlet, tangy katsu sauce, shredded cabbage salad & steamed vegetables”. Very good, there’s lots of broccoli, carrots, cauliflower and brown rice underneath the cutlet.

Why resist? Inari Sushi made with brown rice and topped with Kinpira Gobo (a Japanese salad of burdock and carrot).

This was my first visit to M Café de Chaya in Hollywood and I really enjoyed it. They serve organic “Contemporary Macrobiotic Cuisine”. Rather hoity-toity and very California, I know, but don’t knock it till you try it. Everything on the menu sounded excellent, and everything I saw on other people’s plates looked lovely.

I decided to try the ‘Bi-Bim Bop’ rice bowl: “Pan-fried tofu, Korean-style vegetables, spicy miso sauce & house-made kim chee”. It was great. The different veggie toppings included kinpira gobo (a Japanese burdock root and carrot salad) as well as a pickled cucumber salad, a mushroom salad, bok choi and a number of other goodies you can’t see under all that which I can’t really identify. The spicy miso was very tasty, similar to Korean style bbq sauce.

Along with my entree I also had a carafe of iced barley tea (yum, I wish I had more with me right now)…

…and to top it all off, a flax seed and currant scone.

M Café de Chaya is not an exclusively vegetarian restaurant, but the vegetarian/vegan items do seem to be their specialties. I’d be happy to eat there again sometime, being especially intrigued by their Gado Gado with tempeh (an Indonesian salad with peanuts) as well as their Madras Tempeh Wrap which involves masala-baked tempeh and soy yogurt. If you’re doing the hipster thing and happen to find yourself hanging out down on the trendy side of Melrose (it’s just before La Brea), be sure to give this place a try.

The “Veggie Delight” at HealthyCA features a “macrobiotic tofu-grain patty with pesto sauce” and choice of two sides. I got the red smashed potatoes and grilled asparagus. Everything on the plate was delicious. The yummy patties were more moist and flavorful than they appear (I thought they looked a bit dry and bland but I loved the flavor and the texture was very nice), the potatoes are super good and olive oily and the asparagus gets grilled in a tasty marinade that I have yet to figure out how to describe, but I’m guessing there’s some soy sauce in there, and something slightly sweet. I wish they’d give me a bottle of it to take home so I could put it on everything.

Update: I just learned the potato salad here is not vegan, so don’t eat it if you are so (not) inclined.