| rev:text
| - People want to eat vegan. They don't want to BE vegan. The Flaming Ice Cube helps with that.
Which is to say that douchebag vegans have ruined the concept for everyone, since the popular vision is an emaciated hipster with BO berating you for killing the planet. But there's another kind of casual veganism, one that involves actually just liking the taste of the food and wanting the health benefits....
...and you know what? The Flaming Ice Cube is cozy. The place is small, but comfortable. The staff smile and will answer your questions. And they all look healthy, happy, and at ease, which means you will be too.
Let us be honest and say that if you're seeking for the heights of vegan cuisine, you'll want Pura Vida a few doors down. But Flaming Ice Cube is about sandwiches, smoothies, wraps, and muffins - quick lunch fare, served tastefully. It's kind of like a great B-movie, like, say, The Princess Bride or Galaxy Quest - they weren't shooting for high art when they made their films, but like Babe Ruth, they pointed their finger and hit the ball right to that goddamned home run.
...did I just mix sports metaphors with movie metaphors while describing food? Crap, I did. In any case, what you get are sandwiches and veggie burgers - never the pinnacle of haute cuisine - but the sandwiches are triple-A sandwiches.
The sandwiches, it must be said, focus pretty heavily on the meat-alternatives - you can have a variety of soyburgers and tempeh. But they're smart enough to realize that nothing is going to replace the taste of a juicy burger, so all the sandwiches concentrate on the flavor you put on top of the burger. So you get pesto burgers with cheese topping, or chickenless salad sandwich with a lot of vegan mayo, or mushroom burgers with cheese and onions. Which makes the burgers pretty tasty.
Also tasty: their smoothies, which may be the best in town. They're pure vegan, which is to say you're getting yogurt and not a lot of corn syrup (if any!), but they do layer the flavors so they're amazing and candylike.
The disappointment is their hummus, which is a little dry and tasteless. But their side dishes, which change daily, are usually very yummy, and today I had a marinara "meatball" sub that I couldn't have told you was faked. (Again, you put the "meat" in enough zingy sauces and ricotta cheese, and you won't notice it ain't meat.)
Also, they have vegan cupcakes, which are damn delicious. As someone who'd never had a vegan cupcake, I approached it like it was carob - which is to say, the kind of thing someone would only say "tastes like chocolate" if they'd forgotten what chocolate tasted like - and I couldn't tell it wasn't filled with eggs. It was moist (unlike some of the vegan cupcakes I've tasted since, which err on the dry side) and the frosting was delectable.
So for the price, this is a slam dunk. It's a comfort restaurant, with thoughtful design and placement and very nice people. It might just change your mind about this whole vegan idea. It makes me happy to know they're in Cleveland.
|
![[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)