Vegan home cooking, by way of Japan
Don’t overlook store’s cafe
Japanese ladies cooking Japanese food? As chain restaurants gobble up diners and restaurant workers, I’m in. I’m fond of quirky independents.
Tama Organic Life is first an organic food store, including fresh produce from small farms, Japanese vegetables and house-made, fresh Japanese ingredients. Secondly, it’s a humble cafe with vegan and often macrobiotic food. The menu’s small, but those ladies (about five of them rotate) are cooking with mom love. (There seems to be a theme developing. A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Dosanko, run by a chef who’s cooking Japanese homestyle food, inspired by the meals his wife used to cook for their kids.)
I’ve written about owner Hiroko Sugiyama before. She ran Tama in North Vancouver and for a time hired a soba noodle-maker for lunches. She’s passionate about supporting small farmers and pointing people to healthy ways.
“We can’t keep healthy just with good food. We need to look at the big picture — a healthy land and earth, and so it’s important to support good farmers,” she says.
Earlier in the year, she moved to east Vancouver to a bigger space and soon started serving these lunches.
Look first to the vegan bento-box special. It’s a $14.95 meal with a main feature and side dishes filling up the dramatic, lacquered blackand-red bento box.
When I dropped in, the vegan special didn’t scream Japanese — the ladies roll with what’s on hand as any home cook would and what muse might strike. That day, it was green split-pea falafel (as opposed to the standard chickpea) with Japanese slipped into the sauce, a miso tahini dressing. The rest of the bento box was a thoughtful and colourful mix — a mizuna and shiso leaf gomae (sesame and soy dressing), a Japanese cabbage (softer and sweeter) salad with lemon cucumber.
“I came across lemon cucumbers on a trip to the U.S.,” manager Noriko Kayo says. “It’s sweet and the skin isn’t as hard and it’s really hard to find. I was hoping to introduce it at Tama and was so happy when we found some through our farmers.”
I’m not finished with the bento lunch yet — there was also a scoop of ratatouille, some kyuchan (Japanese cucumber pickles usually eaten with curry), a dome of flavourful brown rice and wedges of plums. The side dishes are constantly changing.
I’ve heard the natto burger, when it’s available, is delicious — a minor coup, since it’s not the most appealing ingredient. It’s gooey (or shall I say slimy) fermented soy beans — very healthy for the probiotics and for busting up blood clots. It’s mixed with tomato, burdock and sweet-and-sour flavours and inserted between brown rice instead of wheat buns. A lot of the food is gluten-free, in fact, except for a tart shell.
The vegan bento-box special has in the past included gyoza, spring rolls, veggie croquettes and tofu isobe (tofu and vegetables wrapped in nori and baked).
I also tried the nori onigiri ($3.50), which was big enough to serve as a light lunch. Nori is wrapped around brown rice, fried tempeh, veggies, and was there a tang of the pickled salty-sour plum?
Regular items include a wrap (house-made with spelt), loaded with tempeh and fresh vegetables, and fruit, sandwiches, Japanese salad, a daily soup and the nori onigiri.
I chatted over lunch with customer Heather Newman, a herbalist, and learned a little about the under-appreciated role of plants in health and healing. She appreciates Tama being in her neighbourhood for its transparency and commitment to organic living, especially as she has food-sensitivity issues. Tama, in Japanese, means bullet or jewel. I think to many like Newman it’s definitely the latter.
Healthy doesn’t mean forsaking dessert, and there’s always some mostly gluten-free baking, mixing fruits and veggies — peach carrot cake, mochi zucchini brownie sweetened with house-made amazake (fermented rice made with koji), amazake miso biscotti, amazake mousse, fruit, parfaits and a fruit wrap. I had a beet-and-blueberry tart (the shell was made from wheat in this case) and liked the cheekiness of ignoring the fruit-and-vegetable standoff. Nearly all the desserts have a vegetable element, and I’m all for it. Vegetable lives matter!
Whistler’s Cornucopia
The 11-day festival kicks off Nov. 9 with events going all day, every day. They include wine dinners, seminars (wine, whisky, cocktails), cooking demos, workshops, lunches, brunches and parties. Get all the info at whistlercornucopia.com.