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Heres Every Celebrity Who Was Spotted At Pure Food And Wine

Serving Gordon RAW Food | Hell’s Kitchen

Musicians, actors… even a former president! Here are the famous people who loved the Bad Vegan restaurant.

In the mid-2000s, one of New York Citys hottest spots was raw food restaurant Pure Food and Wine, which attracted a whos who of cultural icons, from vegans like Alicia Silverstone to actors like Alec Baldwin to former presidents like Bill Clinton.

Within a decade, Pure Food and Wines star had faded. Bad Vegan, a new docuseries, dives into the rise and fall of the raw vegan restaurant, the allure of co-founder Sarma Melngailis, the devotion inspired by the con man who promised to grant her dog immortality, and the way everything in their raw food empire quickly crumbled.

Before all that happened, Pure Food and Wine was practically an institution in a city of ever-changing trends including lots of celebrities interested in a vegan lifestyle. Heres a rundown of all the famous faces who visited before Pure Food and Wine closed for good.

But What About Pure Food And Wine The Iconic Restaurant That Launched Her Into Infamy

As someone who frequented the hotspot while it was still open, I’ve always been interested in the restaurant’s story even before the documentary came about.

So I’m writing this post as BuzzFeed.com’s resident longtime vegan, and for all of my friends who have been texting me about Bad Vegan since it debuted on Netflix. Here’s everything I remember…

Here’s What Happened With Sarma Melngailis’s Pure Food And Wine Restaurant

The downfall of celebrity restaurateur Sarma Melngailis is the subject of Netflix’s latest documentary, “Bad Vegan: Fame. Fraud. Fugitives.” The four-part series explores how Melngailis went from owning popular restaurant Pure Food and Wine to becoming a runaway fugitive.

Frequented by celebrities like Alec Baldwin and Owen Wilson, Pure Food and Wine opened in 2004 and was one of New York’s first raw-food restaurants. However, after Melngailis stole millions of dollars from the restaurant and failed to pay her employees on multiple occasions, the staff walked out, and the restaurant eventually closed in 2015.

After a year on the run, Melngailis was arrested in 2016 along with her husband, Anthony Strangis, for unpaid-wage lawsuits and stealing from restaurant investors. Melngailis pleaded guilty for stealing $1 million from the eatery but claimed she only did so because Strangis convinced her that he could expand her food empire and make her beloved dog immortal. So, what happened to Pure Food and Wine?

Former employees initially tried to reopen the restaurant without Melngailis, but their efforts were unsuccessful. The restaurant has remained closed ever since however, Melngailis is open to reviving it. “If there was some magical opportunity to open the same restaurant in the same place, I would do it in a heartbeat,” she told the New York Post in 2019 after serving time at Rikers. “I think New York would take me back.”

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A Different Kind Of Vegan Restaurant

Amanda Cohen, chef-owner, Dirt Candy former executive chef, Pure Food and Wine: You didnt walk in and think, Oh, this is a vegetarian restaurant. You’re like, Its just a restaurant and they happen to serve raw food or vegan food. Certainly, the vegetarian and vegan community was craving something like that that just didnt exist in the city really at the time. There was Candle 79, but, before that, honestly, it was just Zen Palate, when it had its upstairs on Union Square. We just didnt have fancy, more upscale vegetarian restaurants. You had all the health-conscious people who were like, I can go with my friends, and theres cocktails and people look normal and its pretty people, and so they didnt feel uncomfortable. The city was craving that restaurant.

Charlotte Druckman, writer, editor, Women on Food:It had that outdoor garden, so it was a place that people went even if they didnt care about eating raw food, even if they didnt have any particular dietary or political interest about food. It was more like, Oh, my God, dont forget that place is the place with a really good patio where you can go sit down and have a glass of wine. So theres this whole other thing happening there that Im not sure had anything to do with the culture of the menu.

An Oral History Of Pure Food And Wine The Bad Vegan Restaurant

Our very own Pure Food and Wine raw vegan lasagna !!!! By Lindsay and ...

The people who worked and ate at Pure Food and Wine remember what it was like.

Not too long ago, there was a brief window during which raw vegan food looked like it could become a legitimate cuisine, a natural evolution of vegan dining focused on scientifically dubious claims about enzymes and energy levels. In 1995, a man who went by Juliano opened the restaurant Raw Experience, which received a positive review in the San Francisco Chronicle. In 1999, he put out The UNcook Book: New Vegetarian Food for Life. Also in the Bay Area, Roxanne Kleins restaurant Roxannes was even more well received, perhaps because Klein had already attained a mainstream cooking pedigree and published a fully raw cookbook with Chicagos famed restaurateur Charlie Trotter, titled Raw.

Neither of these restaurants achieved longevity, though, not even in a part of the US that has famously accommodated each new phase of meatless eating over the past few decades. Instead, against all probability, culturally and climatically, the raw vegan movement had its most successful restaurant in New York City. Celebrities, omnivorous and otherwise, were spotted there. It hosted publishing parties covered by Gawker. It opened in 2004 and closed in 2015. Its name was Pure Food and Wine.

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Who Is Sarma Melngailis

According to Paper Mag, Melngailis was once celebrated for her business and cooking skills. She graduated with an economics degree from Wharton and then obtained a culinary degree from the French Culinary Institute in 1999. She then worked in various restaurants and wrote several cookbooks before being drawn to the raw food movement and vegan eating. She and her boyfriend, chef Matthew Kenney, opened Pure Food and Wine in 2004. It quickly attracted celebrities like Anne Hathaway and Rooney Mara, and had an annual revenue of about $7 million, per Vanity Fair.

Once They Moved Into The Space Matthew Wrote About How They Set Up The Kitchen Too: Once We Removed The Hood We Set About Creating A Space That Was Designed For This Food Our New Food Compete With Dehydrators And Plenty Of Counter Space

Excalibur dehydrators were used to make any raw versions of crackers, breads, and other carb-like items. Food was plated onto marble countertops before bringing it out to guests to be eaten.

While the nontraditional kitchen worked for a raw food empire, it could also explain why the space hasn’t been filled since Pure Food and Wine closed.

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The Best Wine And Seafood Pairings In Marietta

The next time you want to delight your taste buds with a stellar wine and seafood pairing, drop by Macs Raw Bar, a. With a little knowledge about what flavors pair well together and some advice from our pairing experts, you can easily choose from araw bar menuthat will have you raving for weeks. Stop by today and see why our wine and seafood pairings are the best in town!

One Of Pure Food And Wine’s Main Draws For New Yorkers Was The Expansive And Beautiful Backyard Seating

RAW FOOD That Isn’t Meat | Hell’s Kitchen

But before it was Pure, a restaurant named Verbena was in the space. In his book Cooking Raw, Matthew explains that he met the landlady for the space, who happened to be vegetarian, which he took as a sign that the space would be theirs. Financier Jeffrey Chodorow wasn’t impressed with the spot at first: he didn’t have a thing for gardens, the $20,000/month price tag for rent was stiff, and the large amount of work it would take to make it look nice again:

“The place was filthy, and there were dozens of dead water bugs everywhere. Grease lined the exhauster and it had that haunted aroma of a long-dead restaurant. It was hard to imagine this once jewel of a place had only closed a week ago. I could see its bones, though: still good and strong and salvageable.”

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Pure Food And Wine Had Loyal Employees And A Celeb Clientele

The raw vegan restaurant Pure Food And Wine was founded in 2004 as a collaboration between Melngailis and her boyfriend at the time, chef Matthew Kenney, with funding from restaurateur Jeffrey Chodorow. In 2005, Melngailis bought out Kenney’s stake and ran it herself, with the Gramercy eatery building a loyal clientele, including celebs like Anne Hathaway, Owen Wilson, and recurring Bad Vegan namedrop Alec Baldwin, who met his wife Hilaria at the restaurant in 2011.

Per Grub Street , the restaurant became known as “vegan-glamorous,” at a time before Impossible Burgers and plant-based everything. Some of their popular offerings included spicy Thai lettuce wraps, zebra tomato-and-zucchini lasagna with pistachio-basil pesto, and a Master Cleanse Tini . There was also intense loyalty among employees when Melngailis was at the helm, with some workers recalling in the docuseries that they used to call her Sar-mama.

According To Matthew Kenney’s Book Cooked Raw He Left Pure Food And Wine In 2005 After He And Sarma Broke Up

Matthew wrote about his break-up with Sarma as such: “While we may have been glowing in our business life, we weren’t as a couple. At that point I was quite familiar and happy with sleeping on the couch. Neither of us would admit that although we produced great work together, that was where the connection ultimately began and ended. Our book came out in June and was launched with a huge garden party: paparazzi, celebrities, journalists. By the time our book was released with our picture on the cover drinking champagne and sharing the glow together we were not together at all. Things were clearly not going to work out. Sarma and I were on completely different planets.”

But don’t worry too much about him! If you don’t already know, Matthew is one of the leading names in all of plant-based eating these days. He’s published over twelve cookbooks, runs the cooking school Future Food Institute, and runs over fifty vegan restaurants all over the world.

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Staff Ended Up Protesting After Melngailis Didn’t Meet Payroll

When the restauranteur met Strangis in 2011, Pure Food and Wine was profitable, though she still had a substantial loan with Chodorow. Then she began giving the scammer money and undergoing the “cosmic endurance tests” depicted in Bad Vegan. Strangis also started immeshing himself in the eatery’s day-to-day operations, per the documentary, to the alarm of the staff.

Melngailis and Strangis began failing to meet payroll in 2014, with workers missing checks five times that year, per New York Post . Pure Food and Wine closed temporarily in the winter of 2015, after servers, bartenders, and kitchen staff walked out, protesting the lack of pay. After opening again for a short time, with a round of new investors, the restaurant closed permanently in the spring of 2016.

Melngailis ended up pleading guilty to stealing $1 million from the restaurant. In addition to stiffed investors, Melngailis owed roughly $63,000 to employees, per Vanity Fair . The former owner used money she was paid for Bad Vegan towards back pay, with the outlet confirming that the restitution was received and most of it was paid out.

Early Life And Education

Vegan Raw Lasagna

Sarma Melngailis was born September 10, 1972 in the United States, and was raised in Newton, Massachusetts. Melngailis’s father John Melngailis was born in Riga, Latvia and was a physicist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology . Her early interest in food came from her mother, a professional chef who later co-founded Alyson’s Orchard, a 450-acre apple orchard. Her parents divorced when she was nine years old.

She attended Newton North High School. Melngailis graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1994 with a B.A. degree, and a B.S. degree in economics from the Wharton School.

Melngailis moved to New York City, working at the investment firm Bear Stearns until 1996, then moving to Bain Capital in Boston, working in private equity investment. She returned to New York City in 1998 and joined a high-yield investment fund at CIBC, but soon left to enroll at New York’s French Culinary Institute from which she graduated in 1999.

Together with chef, author, and speaker Matthew Kenney, her then-boyfriend, she opened Commissary in 2001, but it closed in March 2003, after which she consulted for Jeffrey Chodorow’s China Grill Management.

From 2014 until July 2016, One Lucky Duck Juice and Takeaway operated in San Antonio, Texas, the first location outside of New York City.

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Melngailis Later Expanded To A Brand Called One Lucky Duck

Melngailis had begun building an empire by the time she met Strangis. She had written two cookbooks, Raw Food/Real World: 100 Recipes to Get the Glow in 2005, and Living Raw Food: Get the Glow with More Recipes from Pure Food and Wine in 2009. She also opened a trio of juice and takeaway bars called One Lucky Duck, with a logo of a duck that she also tattooed on her arm.

Sarma Melngailis Dog Leon

Melngailis first adopted her dog around 2010, after she befriended actor Alec Baldwin and encouraged him to get a dog. While looking at shelter dogs in Brooklyn, she got attached to a pit bull. So she took him home and named him Leon.

“She wasn’t someone who dated a lot of people,” Baldwin told Vanity Fair.“She worked at the restaurant, did the books, went home, and passed out with her dog.”

One of the major reasons that Melngailis says she believed Strangis claims is because he promised her that “Leon would be immortal and safe by my side for eternity, Melngailis alleged to Vanity Fair. Today, Melngailis still has Leon, and her Instagram is mostly pictures of him and their adventures together. According to a March 10 post, Leon is now 12 years old.

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Sarma Melngailis Morrow $35 Isbn 978

This follow-up to Raw Food/ Real World offers 100 new recipes inspired by the New York City restaurant Pure Food and Wine, where Melngailis is a partner and executive chef. The restaurant is swanky and the book is irreverent its hardly a paean to an obsessively ascetic raw lifestyle. But the recipes are legit: at once sophisticated and rigorously raw, they range from quick and easy milks, juices and items from Pure Food and Wines family meal to intriguing dishes off the restaurant menu. Baby fennel and truffle-cream tarts beet ravioli with pine nuts and goat cheese pumpkin gnocchi with walnut cream sauce, spiced pumpkin seeds and crispy sage and vanilla panna cotta with tarragon-peach sauce all have gourmet appeal well beyond those already committed to the raw food movement. And nonpreachy primers on ingredients and techniques used in raw preparations make the book accessible and usable for a wider audience than might typically go for a raw foods cookbookif cookbook is even the right term for a volume of vegan recipes in which nothing is heated over 118 degrees Fahrenheit.

Living Raw Food: Get The Glow With 100 More Recipes From Pure Food And Wine

PURELY DELICIOUS: NYCS PURE FOOD WINE

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copies bought in the last week

No juicer? No dehydrator? No problem! Sarma shows that raw food preparation doesn’t have to be daunting, and she helps you work your way from the fastest, simplest, freshest recipes to immensely satisfying main dishes that you’ll have a hard time believing are raw. A definitive list of ingredients, tools, techniques, and sources make raw food a snap, while information-packed sidebars introduce the world’s most powerful superfoods, from kombucha tea to chia seeds. And Sarma is refreshingly honest and real as she describes her personal breakthroughs – and struggles – living on raw foods.

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Is Pure Food & Wine From Bad Vegan Still Open

Ever since Bad Vegan: Fame, Fraud and Fugitives dropped on the streaming service last week, we’ve been obsessed with finding answers for our many questions. Namely, what does Sarma Melngailis think of the documentary? Is her dog still alive? And can you still visit the restaurant, Pure Food & Wine, now?

Opened in 2004 by Sarma and her then-boyfriend, chef Matthew Kenney, the NYC restaurant was the place to be in the mid-2000s, serving a menu of raw, vegan food loved by the likes of Owen Wilson and Anne Hathaway.

When the pair broke up in 2005, Sarma took on a $2million loan to own the restaurant, and ran it successfully as a solo venture. Then, in 2011, she met Shane Fox aka Anthony Strangis on Twitter, and the pair got married a year later.

Following their marriage, Pure Food & Wine employees voiced a suspicion of Anthony and his interest in the restaurant. It was later revealed that Sarma allegedly transferred over $1.6 million from the restaurant’s account into her own bank account between January 2014 and January 2015, with led to employees not being paid.

A report from January 2015 in Eater, New York, reading, “Several tipsters are telling Eater that the front and back of the house staff walked out of vegan restaurant Pure Food & Wine after not being paid in a month. A small group of protestors are outside of the restaurant picketing now.”

Bad Vegan is available on Netflix now

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