Once over a bottle of green juice that I shared with a raw vegan I got a recommendation to visit some “raw food”, a place at Patriarshiye Ponds called Ra Family. At first, I thought that the place was named Raw Family. It was logical to assume so, taking into consideration the given course of our convo. It turned out that no. The name of this cafe/yoga/spirit-training center is Ra Family.

I didn’t manage to find out whether the ancient Egyptian sun god Amon-Ra, or the Indian prince’s title of Raja, or the archaic Russian Ra which means light was the root cause of their name; but what I did manage was to eat deliciously there and almost without feeling like the odd one at the raw feast of life, (cause that’s what this place truly is).

As I’ve already said, this isn’t just a vegan cafe, it’s strict vegan. Food heated above 40 degrees Celsius isn’t suitable for them. People choose to live under such restrictions for various reasons: health problems, search for the fountain of youth at the bottom of a coconut water can, moral and ethical reasons (those are the most vegan bigot part of the entire subculture), or as a way to raise one’s level of spirituality through body and consciousness purification by means of living food (all good, if it makes them happy). Anyway, you won’t be able to just drop by and skip their special vibes.

As soon as you take a seat, they serve you a glass of refreshing water (lemon, cucumber, mint). By the way, it feels very right. Perhaps, this is a homage to the healthy lifestyle maxim: “drink a glass of water before each meal”.

We ordered a lot of everything («ain’t no way we gonna be full after this leaf meal, is it?”)). Of course, we couldn’t make it without the traditional tough guy joke about beer, meat and the need to visit a burger shop right after (oh, how smart!). So, we sit there and wait. People around us are very different. At first glance, you won’t be able to grasp whether they’re raw vegan or just some pretentious folks.

They bring us soups. We try them – a coconut one with vegetables and a variation on gazpacho (with beetroot). Good, everyone likes it. Oh, here comes the salad; it’s so very light, green, with grapefruit; the dressing’s peculiar – it’s based on dates. Rolls without rice under a vulgar name of Philadelphia are a success. There is also a raw pizza with nut sauce (hmm… oh well, ok) and a vegan cheese plate. The latter one is plated really neatly: three kinds of pasta (cheese) made of vegetables/nuts/hell-knows-what with soaked figs, dried tomatoes, algae bread crisps and a beetroot salad on the side. Extremely nourishing.

But how can we do without a dessert?!! That’s no good. Our choice fell upon chocolate cake and berry ice cream. I didn’t notice any special differences from other similar desserts of the same degree of healthiness, though everything was really delicious (no flour/sugar, etc., AMEN). In Ra Family there is no coffee. So we had sweet carob and Buddha-tea with spices. We stood up (or rather crawled away) from the table at 5 p.m. Next time it became possible for us just to think about food only the next day around lunchtime (looks like the cheese plate got tough on us). Summary: it’s delicious and really very nutritious. Watch the quantity. We could’ve been full with half we ordered. Oh yeah, and do not mess with raw vegans and their food. What if they curse you, and afterwards you won’t be able to eat anything ever again…

PS:  There was some respectable man at the next table. At first he had a really notable dessert in the form of a chocolate ball (it was the last one, there wasn’t any left for me; I even shamelessly asked the mister to take a picture of his plate), then a cheeseburger (it looked really cool, but I decided not to nightmarize the man any longer: my plan is to come back with an proper inspection), and he finished it up with a cherry borscht. So it was. Just like this. A dinner in the fashion of Benjamin Button)) Some doctors really argue that you should start your meal with a dessert (glucokinase is an enzyme, and it carefully monitors the amount of the intake of starch and glucose and gives you the feeling of satiety), but it was a surprise for me to see that people really do so. It made me think. In short, it’s a true almshouse. You come with one food deviation; you leave with a whole bunch of them.