San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Wildseed is vegan (but don’t call it that)
Could the secret of success be that its omnivore founders’ striking cuisine has broader appeal?
If you want a glimpse of one possible restaurant future, go to Wildseed on Union Street.
The monthold restaurant in Cow Hollow is the latest concept by the Back of the House restaurant group, whose parade of hits has shown a preternatural ability to anticipate culinary trends: grassfed fast food burgers (Super Duper), pizza and cocktails (Beretta, Delarosa), gourmet fried chicken sandwiches (the Bird), and now, plantbased cuisine. To see this group putting its chips down on vegan cuisine is very telling of how Bay Area diners will be eating in the next decade. If the future of food is vegan, this spot is a very convincing data point in that theory’s favor.
Wildseed is effective because of how well it is camouflaged as your usual trendy neighborhood restaurant. Its folksy decor is anchored in a Pinterestfriendly combination of turquoise and gold; it looks more like an oyster bar than a vegan spot. Its menu, crafted by omnivores, has the potential to appeal to a wide range of eaters.
Case in point: On a recent weekend night, the wait for a walkin table was two hours. (If you’re open to sitting at a communal table in the lounge area, that wait will be heavily truncated; and reservations are available.)
Situated at the nexus of a SoulCycle, an Equinox and five yoga studios, the allvegan restaurant slots in extremely well with Cow Hollow’s wellness worshipers, who flock here for postworkout meals of beet pate, kombucha cocktails, Impossible burgers and cheeseless cheesecake. According to Wildseed chef Blair Warsham, the management team even joked about putting out a storage receptacle for rolledup yoga mats — and now experience has warmed them to the idea of actually doing it. It’s clear that Wildseed resonates with the neighborhood a lot more than its predecessor, Belga, a Belgianinspired concept centered around sausages.
The dishes at Wildseed are striking and colorful, almost too aware of vegan cuisine’s unfair reputation for consisting of drab beans and rice. “Look how I
shine!” the dishes seem to say. A ceviche of king trumpet mushrooms cut to look like slivers of sea scallop ($11) floats in a pinkorange leche de tigre with sliced cherry tomatoes, popped sorghum and chunks of mango and avocado. You’re meant to scoop it up with blue corn tostadas dusted with za’atar, which doesn’t do much flavorwise but certainly looks nice. A gorgeous whipped banana dessert ($8) is a gourmet take on the viral twoingredient recipe, gilded like a Christmas tree with toasted coconut flakes and shining purple globes of plump Concord grapes. The grapes’ beauty is an argument for plants in itself, also seen in the prominent, countryfairperfect jars of pickles in the mantel above the kitchen and in the walllength mural in the dining room.
Though zealotry is a common negative stereotype about vegans, it’s interesting to see how a dietary proselytization is reframed at Wildseed. The purpose of the restaurant, whose owners are mostly omnivorous but spent some time eating vegan to better understand the idea, is to win over agnostics of an occasional vegan diet. There’s even explicit language in Wildseed’s promotional materials that ties that choice with moral and ethical goodness: “Wildseed offers guests a chance to make a better choice — a place where you can feel good about the decisions you are making,” the website states. Still, the
language is soft and almost vague in its calls to action, refraining from doomsaying or calling out bad behavior. The menu at Wildseed avoids using the word “vegan,” which leads to slight confusion when ingredients like sour cream and Parmesan are presented plainly. Though the menu does say that everything is “plantbased,” it’s reasonable for newbies to do some mental contortion and assume that sun + grass x cow = cheese. The burger, which comes with either a housemade mushroomandspinach patty ($15) or an Impossiblebranded one ($17) dressed with chipotle aioli, grilled onions and tomato, is available with “cheese,” without any wording regarding its vegetable origin. (Adding to this conceptual knot is the fact that mushrooms aren’t technically plants.)
Otherwise, the global menu is easy to grasp and modular enough to adapt to any eating style. Salads are ample and original. The Andalusian salad ($14) tastes like a salad version of a very good cheese plate, as Warsham pairs red chicories with Miyoko’s cashew cheese, coconut bacon, Marcona almonds and a Sherryhoney vinaigrette. The creative use of vegan cheese overall shows how far we’ve come from the snotlike product that I remember melting over tortilla chips a decade ago. Vegans today have it pretty good.
Warsham’s unique take on Vietnamese noodle salad ($13) is given weight with hunks of smoky charred eggplant that contrast well with its sour, limedominant dressing. Each of these works very well as a shared or personal meal. Some of the menu might seem very familiar, particularly to Bay Area dining veterans. The “to share” section includes a nod to Belga, with its fries ($9) served in an upright cone with herb aioli, chipotle sauce and curry ketchup. Some might also notice how the wild mushroom zeppole ($8), porcinidusted fried nuggets served with roasted garlic aioli, suggest the signature dish from Rich Table. Their flavor was strong and the batter light, though its surface was too soft to convey the textural excitement of eating a fried treat. A hearty, Greenslike entree of a Hodo tofu skewer with mushrooms, onion and yam ($15) is paired with
an overly sour quinoa salad and a cucumber raita that is so realistic it gave my dining companion some pause. “Wait, is this actually yogurt?” she wondered.
When asked about this, the servers do their best to work around the terminology: “We don’t use any animal products,” they say.
They could save some words by just saying “vegan,” but there’s a point to this.
The approach is indicative of a burgeoning countermovement to veganism that has adopted its diet, but not its politics of disruption. When asked about this,
Warsham was honest about how he felt about that decoupling: When a branch of the Bird, his fried chicken restaurant, opened in Berkeley, its relationship to its neighbor, the animal rights group Direct Action Everywhere, was fraught from day one.
“Those little spoiled brats would come in and storm the restaurant and block the register,” he said. “They brought live chickens in front of people, shoved them in people’s faces on opening day. They did all kinds of protests and all kinds of nonsense. And it never effected the slightest bit of change.” Avoiding that “kneejerk, negative connotation” is part of why the term “plantbased” stuck, he said.
Vegans will probably disagree with this approach, but clearly it has found an eager audience in Cow Hollow.
When asked about the difference between the terms, Mark Bomford, a farmer and director of Yale University’s Sustainable Food Program, said that it comes down to a value proposition: “vegan” and “meatfree” make you think that you’re abstaining or giving something up, whereas
“plantbased” or “plantstrong” have more forward propulsion. “In terms of marketing communication, it’s about winning, not about losing,” he said.
Perhaps the key to Wildseed’s success is the fact that “vegan” and “vegetarian” can do double duty to describe both a product and a personal identity, whereas the comparatively more apolitical “plantbased” cannot. Its voice of persuasion is intentionally dulcettoned, enticing like that of a siren. Look at how wonderful life can be over here, it sings, in this land of “milk” and “honey.”