Seeking out raw talent

Orb Café, Shining Light 246 Morrison Street, Edinburgh 0131 229 5775 Lunch/dinner Food rating

T£8-£22 8/10

HE Orb Cafe, in the Shining Light holistic centre in Edinburgh, is a temple to rawism. Never heard of it? Wake up: it’s taking the health food world by storm. Have a look at the shelves of your wholefood store and you’ll see the word raw cropping up on a growing number of products: raw chocolate, raw sauerkraut, raw coconut oil, raw granola, raw vinegar.

What is rawism? Well, the fundamental principle is that eating foods in their most natural state, uncooked and unprocessed, is the most nutritious way to feed yourself.

So if you are a rawtarian, you never cook anything above 45C, because the thinking is that the heat destroys, or drastically reduces, many of the valuable vitamins and enzymes that promote good digestion and generally support health.

You’ll eat mountains of fruits and vegetables, seaweed, sprouted grains and pulses, nuts and dried foods, and you’ll be chopping, peeling, blending and sieving food big time. While your run- of- the- mill foodie covets a KitchenAid mixer, raw foodists dream of owning a dehydrator so they can make sprouted buckwheat bread, flax crackers and fruit leathers.

Refined sugar – that infamous spawn of Satan – is a no-no, as is caffeine and alcohol. You will probably have guessed that most rawtarians are also vegans, although some will eat raw eggs and dairy products, provided they come from grass-fed livestock.

For those dietitians who evangelise the virtues of the NHS Eat Well plate programme ( better described as the Eat Badly plate) a raw food diet is faddy, and potentially dangerous, but there is a body of scientific literature to back the notion that food in its raw state has the optimum nutritional profile.

My problem with rawism is more practical. Who wants to eat cold food all the time if you live in Scotland? If you ask me, the pioneers of raw food were surfer dudes who hung out on some Californian beach.

I wasn’t sure to expect when I dropped in to Orb and went prepared with multiple layers of clothing to insulate myself from the cold. The stairs up to the centre confirm all the worst suspicions. Dank, slightly sinister, as if you were entering some weird sect that would want you to instantly donate all your worldly fortune to the guru.

That made the café itself a pleasant surprise. It’s clean, bright, positively warm, and although the furniture is incongruously corporate, fit for an insurance company lobby, fresh vases filled with spring flowers sit on all the tables and sun, when there is any, floods in the windows. The people who work here seem to have a similarly sunny disposition. Maybe that’s their raw food diet showing.

Raw food isn’t fast. We could hear the blender working overtime in the kitchen, but the green smoothie of the day (kale, lamb’s leaf lettuce, pea shoots, carrot tops, banana) and the cherry cacao milk shake (almond milk, cacao, black cherries, dates) were worth the wait, the latter particularly interesting because the fudgy sweetness of the dates didn’t mask the cherry-chocolate tryst.

Had it not been for its electrifying ginger dressing, I might have had trouble chomping through the Hoisin “stir fry”, in reality an ambient raw salad of green beans, peppers, cucumber and more served with coils of celeriac noodles. It did, however feel as if it was doing me good, leaving me with a virtuous sensation of purity. A burger made with sunflower seeds, possibly dehydrated, and definitely cold, had a slightly odd, vaguely yeasty, sour tang, but it made another quite intriguing dish with its topping of curdy cashew “cheese”, fiery tomato ketchup and kale and parsnip crisps.

Given the pricy shopping list – heavens, the cost of nuts alone – and the sheer effort that goes into if not cooking, then preparation, Orb’s food is fairly priced.

As a sampler, I’d recommend our desserts, pecan pie, made with a nutty cashew base, and orange and kiwi cheesecake on a dreamy coconut base.

This is food that sends you out energised, satisfying food that sits lightly in the stomach. Not every day perhaps, but once in a while it could be just the job.