A NEW LIFE IN JUICING
Malibu juice magnate Khalil Rafati tells Walter Kirn how he started his business chain
IWASN’T eating right. Was I even eating? In that miserable winter in 2011, I couldn’t always be sure. Unlike my impossibly slender and toned new neighbours here, where I’d rented a small apartment on the beach to escape my cold Montana hometown, I didn’t count calories, carbs or protein in grammes. I only counted kilos, the bottom line.
Lately, I’d lost track even of those. A combination of workaholic strain and grief over my mother’s recent death plunged me into a spiral of self-neglect as I veered between pigging out and going hungry. I was failing as a Southern Californian, and my eyes, as yellow as Post-it notes, were proof.
One day, in this state of nutritional manic depression, I wandered into a juice bar, SunLife Organics. My goal was modest: To drink something, anything, containing maca, a so-called superfood much praised by the yoga instructors and pro surfers whom I sometimes overheard chatting about their health and fitness regimens. I’d scorned these types when I’d first moved to the beach, but physical beauty is a great persuader, and misery soon grows tired of its own company.
I waited in a long line whose glamour quotient — the ratio of pop culture celebrities to people who ought to be, judging by their looks — was higher than I’d ever seen. The decor was predictable: Crystals everywhere. Standing upright on shelves and on the floor were several enormous geodes, split in half, with sparkling amber and purple centres.
Equally luminous were the bottled drinks displayed in a cooler near the front door. I picked up one, a glowing orange potion made of turmeric, raw honey, lemon juice, ginger, black pepper, cayenne and alkaline water. The stuff was called Elixir Of Life, and I sat down to drink it at a communal table under a screen playing surfing videos.
I became a SunLife regular that day, unwittingly joining the only cult that has ever had me for a member. There was something euphoric about the place, as though each morning, just before it opened, someone struck a giant diamond tuning fork that magically resonated till closing time. The young men and women working behind the counter, most of them no older than their late teens, were the handsomest human beings I’d ever seen outside of magazine ads for highend underwear. As they chopped fruits and vegetables and blended smoothies beneath a large sign that read “Love, Heal & Inspire”, they seemed on the verge of bursting into song.
A LIFE SAVED
One morning as I was sipping my Elixir, a lean, compact man with short dark hair approached me. His gaze was unsettling steady, like a therapist’s. I’d noticed him talking from time to time with two of SunLife’s most conspicuous regulars: Anthony Kiedis, the lead singer of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and David Duchovny, the actor. He also appeared to be on intimate terms with an elderly Buddhist monk in saffron robes who came in for acai bowls with chopped bananas.
“That drink saved my life; it’s a game changer,” he said. Then he introduced himself. His name was Khalil, and he was a co-owner of the place.
I said I was pleased to meet him and that his juice bar was the best one I’d ever been to, by a mile. He answered: “I know.” Or maybe he just nodded. All I remember is his startling confidence. That, and the way he looked me in the eye when he told me about the game the drink had changed.
Khalil Rafati is 46, but he shouldn’t be. He should be dead. His first year out West was a Horatio Alger story of humble hard work and social ascendance. He started a business detailing sports cars, and soon found himself employed on the estate of Elizabeth Taylor. Other celebrity clients followed, including Slash, the guitarist for Guns N’ Roses, and Jeff Bridges, the actor.
Unfortunately, Khalil wasn’t content doing odd jobs for the stars; he invested his earnings in bulk purchases of marijuana, which he sold off in small amounts for lavish profits. By the late 1990s, he was peddling Ecstasy at raves and smuggling ketamine, a surgical anaesthetic, across the border from Mexico. Then one night at a party, he tried heroin. It gave him, he writes, what he had always wanted: “A childhood.”
After countless failed attempts at sobriety, he cleaned himself up for the last time on June 18, 2003. “I’d finally reached the bottom of all bottoms,” he said. “There was no more digging left to do; all of my shovels were broken. I was done.” Before long, he’d grown as serious about his recovery as he had been about narcotics.
SIGNATURE SMOOTHIE
In 2007, Khalil founded a sober living house in Malibu, Riviera Recovery, where he concocted what would become SunLife’s signature smoothie, the Wolverine, a date-banana-based drink that also contained maca, bee pollen and royal jelly. “It was meant to rejuvenate and strengthen the patients,” he says, “and give them some much-needed strength. Lethargy in early sobriety is pretty brutal, especially if you’re coming off a long run with hardcore drugs.”
Once he refocused his energy on nutritional matters, his entrepreneurial spirit took over, helped by a series of CDs and DVDs by motivational speaker Tony Robbins. He started to dream of, in his words, “a place where everybody would know your name, just like in the old television show, Cheers.”
Over the years as a SunLife customer, I’ve seen firsthand how Khalil’s juice bars function as informal meeting places for souls on the mend from drugs and alcohol. This makes SunLife more than a zone of good nutrition; it makes it a haven for spirits who truly thirst.