Grezzo Restaurant
69 Prince St
Boston MA
1.857.362.7288
www.grezzorestaurant.com
As you may have noticed I absolutely adore meat but I am also open minded enough to appreciate what folks who DON’T eat meat are trying to do to spice up their culinary lives. Of course taking it to the next level as a vegan is even farther from what I find tempting and stepping it up to being a RAW vegan is a completely different story. What does this mean? It means that nothing ever makes it above 112 degrees. So you like the idea of a lot of pastas as a vegetarian? Or maybe some steamed veggies? Not gonna happen if you are a raw vegan.
Alissa Cohen, owner of Grezzo, and raw foods enthusiast for longer than most folks probably knew what living raw was has done something wild in a specifically wild neighborhood. Nestled between sausages and meatballs in the heart of the North End Cohen has opened up a restaurant that embodies the area in physical style only.
A tiny twenty eight seater means that reservations are necessary as this is truly trendy at the moment. Dimly lit, very close quarters, and oversized paintings of different fruits and veggies on the wall give it a very Italian feel and although the name means Raw in Italian it is nothing like anywhere else in the North End.
The weekly menu means that these specific recommendations might not be that useful but they were certainly indicative of the sorts of food that are served there. Beginning with a glass of “biodynamic” (read: expensive) wine, two appetizers were ordered; the grezzo sliders and the gnocchi carbonara. The sliders, mini hamburger like “house-made patties” (of....?) were beautifully presented and the only real flavor one could taste was the tomato. As for the carbonara the house-made dumplings were moreso just mushy mildly nutty tasting lumps with some sturdy English peas to go with them. Luckily the biodynamic wine proved to be quite good at washing things down.
For the main course I chose the BBQ Watermelon as it tends to be pretty hard to mess up something like watermelon - leave it to a raw vegan to succeed. The watermelon itself was fresh and tiny and the BBQ sauce that topped it wasn’t bad but the infestation of enough poppy seeds to make the four bites it afforded almost unbearably crunchy was certainly not that desirable. The side of baby corn was overwhelming with a coconut liquid basted onto it which completely took away the natural goodness of corn.
The Land and Sea (“lobster” mushrooms - and lots of other mushrooms) fared worse and I opted to try the Native tomato ravioli instead which definitely went over the best at our table - again though the only reason it did so well was that the tomato flavor overpowered the nut cream that everything on the table seemed to be made of.
Although it was tempting to forgo dessert as the bill for three had clearly already topped $100 we all tried something and it was truly the only saving grace of the evening (other than the $9 a glass wine - where do you get off?) The Mexican Chocolate Torte was spicy with it’s habanero and the “gelato” - which was more italian ice with chocolate was actually quite good. The rich brownie sundae too was chocolatey delicious and took all of the previously undesirable bad tastes out of my mouth just in time to be able to at least say to the very delightful waitress that “Dessert was great.”
All in all this restaurant proved several things to me.
1. People are dying for new things - new foods, new ideas, and they’ll pay anything to try them
2. Raw vegan COULD be an alright idea for a restaurant - if they just accepted the fact that the only good raw vegan food would be a series of fruits and vegetables (with fake gelato for dessert) and
3. Pretending you like food is the new liking food - it doesn’t matter if you actually like it what matters is that you were there, and that totally isn’t my scene.
I will never be a vegan, let alone a raw vegan but I’ll be damned if this summer I won't have watermelon every night with dinner but I want it truly raw - hold the BBQ sauce.