| rev:text
| - Finally. Finally. Finally. I had the pleasure of visiting this highly touted, hidden Raw Vegan spot in the bustling 'burb of Port Credit. That is a sentence I never thought I would speak or write in my life, seriously.
Admittedly, I'm about as vegan as a 40oz Porterhouse topped with lamb chops and wrapped in bacon. But I stand by my motto of always being willing to give everything a try once (it's almost never steered me wrong). While this wasn't my first raw vegan experience, it was my first in the 905. After reading some of the tantalizing reviews written by several elite pals, Raw Aura has been on my bookmark list for almost 2 years! The issue that kept me from visiting is I was a little gun shy to visit on my own and anytime I recommended it to friends, the response was.... "well I'd rather have meat".
Last night all the green stars aligned and I not only managed to visit but managed to bring an actual vegan friend along for the ride - I knew this experience would be best by bringing someone who would appreciate it and I was right. We ordered all the food things!
To start we had the Kale Chips, which were puffy, crispy, salty and somehow a little bit cheesy (picture white cheddar flavour), AND an order of vegan nachos! The kale chips were great but the vegan nachos were what really impressed me. Picture deconstructed nachos with a row of guacamole, cashew sour cream (no different in taste from the real sour cream), walnut taco meat and a fresh tomato salsa. Save for the lack of cheese, this was as good as some of the best non-vegan nachos I've ever had.
My dining companions had the Pizza (Sprouted buckwheat and sunflower seed flax crust topped with the chef's daily market toppings) and Ravioli (Red beet ravioli are stuffed with a creamy cashew ricotta cheese, red pepper marinara sauce and crisp dehydrated kale chips) respectively, while I went back to my Italian roots and had the Pasta Bolognese.
If you're a pasta snob like me, then you're very specific about your pasta, but knowing that this was made with Zucchini noodles tossed in a rich house-made tomato red pepper basil marinara sauce, sunflower seed and sun dried tomato sausage, topped with almond parmesan, I was prepared for it to be a little different then my usual carb and meat fiesta. Different was definitely awesome, the freshness and flavours of this dish were unmatched, truly a culinary delight!
The food alone wins them 4 stars but they earn the extra 5th star for price and staff. Where can you realistically get a gourmet dinner main for under $15? I'm not sure which server others are having issues with but our server was super accommodating and friendly. Despite showing up 15 minutes before closing, they were welcoming and did not rush our meal at all. Very appreciative of their hospitality
While I'm not going to be giving up my omnivore ways anytime soon, Raw Aura definitely makes an extremely strong case for including a few extra delicious vegan meals to my rotation as they can be as good (if not better) than some of the meals they model themselves after.
VEGANCREST Out! ;)
PS - next time, the cheese cake is going down. Apparently it's a must
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)
![[cxml]](/fct/images/cxml_doc.png)
![[csv]](/fct/images/csv_doc.png)
![[text]](/fct/images/ntriples_doc.png)
![[turtle]](/fct/images/n3turtle_doc.png)
![[ld+json]](/fct/images/jsonld_doc.png)
![[rdf+json]](/fct/images/json_doc.png)
![[rdf+xml]](/fct/images/xml_doc.png)
![[atom+xml]](/fct/images/atom_doc.png)
![[html]](/fct/images/html_doc.png)