The Raw Kitchen - new premises

I blogged about the Raw Kitchen before but felt a new post needed to be made since their recent reinvention. Not only have they relocated, but they have also gotten bigger.
They are now situated at 181A High Street Fremantle, in what looks like a warehouse. The interior is all high ceiling, open faced brick walls, chain link fences and shipping containers. The tables range from long wooden ones, to booth styles, with seats that look like they have been ripped out of old buses. Sad to say that the other seating seems to range from small wooden chairs to metal ones. Common denominator - all pretty uncomfortable. I was really hoping that with the new venue, they would have ditched those chairs that were obviously built to hold primary school aged kids.
Your cutlery and water gets served to you in glass jars and brown bottles, and the food on small wooden boards and little enamel dishes.

The whole look is a cross between rustic and recycled, which does not appeal to me at all. But then, that is just personal taste, I guess. Just so long everything looked and was clean, that's what matters the most to me - and this place certainly passed that requirement from what I noticed.

We were seated at one of the long wooden tables. Although this new location is much larger than their old one, the place was VERY busy and I understood that having such big communal tables saves on space. Having said that, I didn't really like sitting at a table, facing strangers while I ate. Oh well.

Apart from the food (which I will get to in a moment), the new Raw Kitchen also features the 'Sea Container Gallery' that displays pieces by local artists and craftsmen, which can be purchased.
Yoga and fitness classes, as well as raw food preparation classes are also on offer and I do believe there will be film nights planned.
The new venue also has a bigger shopping area where there are all sorts raw and non-raw  packaged food items - many of them vegan, plus books, gifts, toiletries, etc.

We found the service to be mostly good. Having only just reopened, a LOT of people are curious to see the new place, and so the place was already very busy when we arrived a little before noontime. Nevertheless, we were seated almost immediately and our orders were taken in a timely manner. The only gripe I have is that when ordering, we asked the server if there was any egg in the 'mayo' in two of the dishes we wanted. She kept saying 'There is no dairy' in any of our dishes. I had to point out to her that egg was not dairy, which gave her pause. To her credit, she did go and find out for us. The verdict - NO EGG is used in ANY of their dishes. This of course begs the question  - why do they not mark this on their menu? Their menu is marked as completely dairy free, and where honey is used, it is marked. Why not mark things as completely egg free or just use the 'vegan' tag, and be done with it? Surely, they realize that a big number of their clientele are vegans? 

For our entree, we opted for the Aromatic fennel seed roasted chats with lemon juice. 

I'm a big fan of potatoes and these were lovely. Cooked just right. Obviously, this wasn't a raw entree. Infact, there were quite a few new items on the menu and quite a few were not raw. This may bother some raw food purists and it didn't bother me one bit.

The other entree we had was the Tempeh snaps. These were strips of cooked tempeh, made from lupin and not soy, sitting on top of cooked cauliflower. The dish came with a tasty garlic and caper aioli. I am not big on garlic but found their aioli to be mild on that front, so I enjoyed it very much.

For drinks, I opted for the Blue Moon smoothie, which featured blueberries, banana, lavender, agave, and almond milk. It was delicious. You could certainly taste the lavender but it was not overwhelming.

My partner had the Dream Juice which was a mixture of pineapple, lime, young coconut and apple.

For the mains, we had a lot to choose from. I ordered the club sandwich. 

As you can see from the photo, it was jam packed! Between two layers of dehydrated flax bread, was an assortment of goodness - marinated mushrooms, mango salsa, raw cashew 'mayo', tomatoes, lettuce, cucumber, alfalfa sprouts and onion. (I forgot to ask them to leave the onion out, so just picked it out as best I could.)
The sandwich was delicious but be warned - eating was tricky business. a mixture of hands and cutlery had to be employed.


My partner had the Raw pesto pasta, which featured radish, fresh basil, avocado, capers, sundried tomatoes and baby spinach.

After all of that, we didn't have room for dessert. There was plenty on offer - tarts, cakes, slices, balls, etc. Maybe next time!

The Raw Kitchen is open Mon-Thurs 7.30am - 4pm. Fri-Sun 7.30am - 10pm