Love Yourelf Cafe aims to feed you, make you feel better
Love Yourself Cafe aims to be a convenient destination for vegetarian, gluten-free food and a bevy of drinkable concoctions it says have a variety of benefits
It is the new year, and now is the time for making resolutions. You will go to the gym. You will read all your back issues of The New Yorker. You will (finally) get astoundingly healthy. This last one can be daunting, though, as the list of vitamins you should take and supplements you should own seems ever to increase, and you’ve never been able to get the hang of gluten-free baking. You may now be able to get a little help in this regard — on the same trip you take to go buy your groceries, stop at the ATM and shop for cotton balls.
The Love Yourself Cafe is the restaurant arm of Light Vessel Santa Fe, a spa and wellness center located, somewhat incongruously, at the DeVargas Center. Light Vessel offers a litany of massages and healing treatments and colonics designed to purge the body of harmful toxins, and the Love Yourself Cafe then offers guests the opportunity to rejuvenate themselves with something healthier.
“[Owner Denice Sherwin] wanted to help people clean up their body first, then rebalance their body, then nourish their body,” says Light Vessel spa manager Julie Bastine.
The cafe is both a clean-living brunch spot and a hard-core juice and elixir bar. The brunch menu is entirely organic, vegetarian (with many vegan options) and gluten-free (and they’re working on being local), so those with dietary restrictions can divest themselves of the need to question and specify. The food is both healthy and designed to appeal to ordinary hungry people, including a thoroughly customizable mix-and-match breakfast skillet of roasted potatoes and vegetables, poached eggs, cheeses, and superfoods like almonds, goji berries, chia seeds, etc.
And at the Love Yourself Cafe, loving yourself does not mean depriving yourself of the things you, well, love: They offer gluten-free waffles with berries and whipped cream, huevos rancheros, Caprese Eggs Benedict with chimichurri sauce and balsamic vinegar on paleo bread, ginger and cardamom banana pancakes served with butter or ghee and maple syrup, and daily pastries (yes, pastries!) baked in-house that, according to Slaughter, “don’t tax your glycemic index.”
But the bulk of the menu is devoted to drinkable concoctions (“the most important part of what we do,” says cafe manager Matthew Slaughter), which run the gamut from espresso drinks (made with Picacho Coffee roasted in Las Cruces, a roaster that, according to Slaughter, “tests all of their beans for micro-toxicity”) to blended juices to nutrient-boosted shooters and warm chocolate-and-coffee elixirs that combine an encyclopedia of ingredients.
“The idea behind it,” says Slaughter, “is that these drinks help your body detoxify and cleanse itself.”
The basic green juice (kale, celery and cucumber) is fairly simple, but you can add a whole host of supplements like chlorella, ginseng, MSM (for, some say, dietary sulphur), silica, etc., depending on your ailments or needs. Slaughter and the staff behind the juice bar are happy to help you navigate the somewhat dizzying menu. The coconut-algae shooter is full of hydrating coconut water and chlorophyll, which provide electrolytes and oxygenate the blood to alleviate, among other things, the symptoms of altitude sickness. You can get a probiotic shot to populate your gut flora, for example, or the Flu & Virus Fighter, a shot of coconut water spiked with colloidal silver.
Some of the concoctions include Red Deer Antler in the form of a spray. Red Deer Antler comes from either the fuzz on the growing antlers of deer called the “velvet” (harvested without harming the deer, of course) or the antlers themselves (ditto, since deer regrow their antlers annually) and is considered by some, including practitioners of Chinese medicine, to have rejuvenative properties.
“In our body, about 50 billion cells die every day, so this helps regenerate all of those dying cells,” Slaughter says. “This has the most growth factors of any living organism on planet Earth.”
Red deer antler spray was the subject of controversy a few years ago when it was banned from professional sports for containing a growth hormone called “insulin-like growth factor 1,” or IGF1 (the spray is no longer banned since it was determined that there may not be enough IGF1 in the spray to have any effect). Still, it remains a popular supplement for people looking to put some zing in their yang.
The pièce de résistance on the menu are the elixirs, nutritionally extravagant concoctions of chocolate and/or coffee served hot and warm, like herbal hot chocolate for your mind, body and soul. There’s one with medicinal mushrooms, one with “qi tonics” meant to improve mental focus, or the Bulletproof Monk (butter coffee) with added herbs intended to flush your kidneys.
“Our elixir crafts are designed to give people optimal nutrition for many, many, many hours,” Slaughter says.
Some of the elixirs can be a bit pricey, like the showstopping Everything Jing, which tops out at $25 (you can add three shots of red deer antler spray for another $12) and contains a laundry list of herbs and supplements like cordyceps (a kind of fungi), Chinese herbs like he shou wu, more familiar things like cacao and vanilla, all bound together with coffee or dandyblend (a caffeine-free coffee alternative made of dandelion root and chicory) and milk.
“With our very expensive Everything Jing, it’s the cost of two glasses of wine, and it’s going to stay with you for hours and hours and help replenish the things we need for our sexual vitality, our reproductive vitality, and our kidney and our adrenal vitality,” Slaughter claims. “That’s what it’s designed to do.”
You can also boost your Everything Jing with some deer placenta, which is currently not listed on the menu but is available if you ask for it.
“Deer placenta is an amazing immune modulator, so it helps your immunity,” Slaughter says. “It’s the reason why mothers will eat the placenta and feed it to their babies. … It’s also an amazing supplement for reproductive organs.”
On the outside, Light Vessel and the Love Yourself Cafe offer an enigmatically uninformative facade, but inside you find a calming spa-like atmosphere that is half Italian Renaissance, half New Agey. According to Slaughter, the whole center is designed to be a faraday cage, an enclosure made of conductive material that blocks electric fields (useful for blocking radio interference, most cell service and, apparently, Wi-Fi, which the center does not offer). Also, the center is located where it is, at the apex of much of Santa Fe’s errand-running life, because it is intended to be an everyday habit, not a special event. The cafe menu integrates with and supplements the Light Vessel’s treatments, which are in turn designed to integrate easily into the daily lives of its patrons.
“Our owner, Denice, has put the Light Vessel into the DeVargas Center so that it’s not a destination and it’s not a retreat — so that it’s a part of your everyday life,” Slaughter says. “I think one of the most beautiful things is that so many people go through serious transformations on the energetic level because of the nutrition that they’re getting. … Whenever people are ready to show up, we’ll be here to help you.”