MOTH CAFE LIVENS UP EAST JASPER AVE.
Vegan offerings are interesting, inventive, delicious
The Moth Café deserves kudos on at least two fronts — for offering vegan food that is both interesting and delicious, and for livening up a section of Jasper Avenue east in desperate need of help.
The first accomplishment is no surprise. The Moth is the sister restaurant of Cafe Mosaics, a Whyte Avenue staple for fresh, fabulous vegan and vegetarian food. The new restaurant brings a new, all plant-based menu (without dairy or egg), but with the same focus on tasty, inventive food.
Its brave location, next to what was once the Chinatown Mall but is now an abandoned, ramshackle eyesore, gives further hope that this neighbourhood — known as The Quarters — is finally realizing the revitalization that has seemed imminent for more than a decade. A new LRT station is under construction to the west. Across the street, the gaping pit left by an abandoned condo project is being resurrected as a residential tower.
The strip mall that is home to The Moth and Syphay (the wonderful Thai restaurant next door) has become a tiny oasis among these blocks-in-transition. On a recent Saturday night, barely a month after opening, The Moth is doing a solid business with a mostly under-30 crowd. Inside, the room is bright and airy, with high ceilings, exposed brick, light wood and touches of greenery.
The food menu isn’t huge, covering a selection of small bites, allday
breakfast, soups and mains. What IS huge is the drinks menu — I counted 10 pages — of medicinal teas, tonics and elixirs, with their purported health benefits described. A selection of “superfoods 2.0” like pine pollen and spirulina can also be added to the drinks.
There are coffees and tea lattes available, with almond, soy, coconut or cashew milk instead of dairy, and sweeteners that include raw sugar, stevia, agave and maple syrup. While there are plans to include beer and wine in the future, the current bar is limited to a variety of gin-and-tonics. There’s also a (non-alcoholic) kombucha bar, offering eight taps of the trendy, fermented tea in flavours like lavender lemonade and mojito mint.
Drinks alone can quickly add up — my yummy cardamom rose latte was $7.50; small glasses of kombucha are $4 each and blended ice drinks run $8 to $9.50.
The digestive power medicinal tea that my friend ordered arrived in a mason jar fitted with a small strainer — cute, but impractical, if you’ve ever tried to hold a glass jar filled with steaming hot tea. While she enjoyed the flavour, she said it looked a little too much like a lab sample for her liking.
Our group shared a couple of the small plates, including the lentil walnut pate ($12) and some “crab” cakes ($12) made from jackfruit. The versatile, flaky flesh of the unripe fruit was a nice substitute for crab. But the deep-fried cakes weren’t spicy as promised, and the dipping sauce, made from coconut cream, was pretty bland. The lentil pate, which came with small rounds of garlic baguette, had a nice texture, but also lacked flavour.
Among the mains, the Moth spaghetti ($15) was a hit, with its substantial “meatballs” made from soy protein and mushrooms (not from moths, as you might think) in a chunky, spicy tomato sauce. The avocado toast alongside added a nice bit of colour.
The lemongrass minty vermicelli bowl ($15) was another favourite, packed with herbs, greens, sautéed peppers, onions, mushrooms, bean curd and chopped peanuts. The coconut lime laksa noodle soup ($15) was comforting and fragrant, with a delicious coconut broth and slices of king mushroom, served with a big wooden spoon/ladle.
For a winter meal, the raw lasagna ($17) wasn’t nearly as satisfying. Really more of a salad, it looked quite pretty, with layers of zucchini, tomato slices, cashew cheese, basil pesto and a smoky tomato sauce. It would work better as a light lunch, preferably in summer, when the fresh tomato would be more of a treat than a liability.
To me, the biggest challenge for a vegan restaurant is dessert. But the Moth clearly makes an effort to come up with inventive treats. We tried a couple — a clever take on carrot cake that was vegan, gluten-free, raw and, surprisingly, tasted not bad at all. A couple of sweetened patties of shredded carrot and coconut were stacked together with “icing” made from sweet, citrusy coconut cream.
Our other dessert choice, a brownie coconut pudding, was downright delicious. The pudding was lighter and looser than expected, layered over chunks of gluten-free brownie. For a dessert made without milk, eggs, flour or fruit, it was pretty impressive.
In fact, I was impressed with the whole experience at The Moth, though I have yet to figure out the name. Is it a quirky superhero thing? A moth-to-flame analogy? But then wouldn’t the cafe be called The Flame, not The Moth? No matter, the family behind the new eatery continues to do its own unique and special thing in an under-served part of the city, and for that, it deserves support.