Posted By: The Food Gal®
Ubuntu is America’s newest, hippest, most publicized vegetarian restaurant for a reason, and that reason is: they don’t live by the soy and/or die by the soy. Tofu is barely seen on the menu, and chefs Jeremy and Deanie Fox are so creative with their ingredients that this is a vegetarian restaurant even carnivores can appreciate. Plucked right in the middle of downtown Napa, it is among many businesses that have turned this once abandoned area into a foodie mecca rivaling those found miles to the north on Highway 29.
* CAPS in photo descriptions: from the UBUNTU biodynamic garden
Burgeoning downtown Napa is being renovated by folks who are full of ideas, and rich with the bounty of their land, fresh raw ingredients, and homemade goods a plenty. It is this backyard pantry of “real” food that Ubuntu draws its inspiration from. Some of the ingredients on your plate are even grown on-site in Ubuntu’s biodynamic garden.
Don’t let the Yoga studio and zen-stylings fool you. The Foxes make good food that just happens to be vegetarian — some of it even vegan. All us newbies to this cuisine commented that night (as we surfed family style from dish to dish), that the food is so wonderful and full of intense flavors you easily forget you’re dining on hippie ingredients. Our local host and International Foodie, Maura, (who lives within a stone’s throw of the French Laundry, Bouchon, Redds, Ad Hoc in Kellerville….er…uh…I mean, Yountville), ordered everything on the menu but the soup, and we didn’t find one dish worth faulting. Ubuntu makes you feel privy to the feast of the region, to the feast of the season, and to the feast of life — something this Vegan (a Las Vegan) never finds in all of the trucked and flown in produce brought to my overlit desert food city.
Ubuntu Restaurant & Yoga Studio
1140 Main Street
Napa, CA 94559
707.251.5656
Wonderful review Food Gal. Me thinks ELV will be posting your posts again! And while I am one of the most carnivorous carnivores around, your review of the vegetarian cuisine at Ubuntu reminds me of how delicious a vegetable can be-without being crowded off the plate with a hunk of meat.
This food Looks Delicious! There is a nice mix of simple rustic items but the refinement is apparent. Product looks to be top notch and very fresh. I cannot wait to visit next time I find myself in the Valley. Great Job Food Gal. Feel better John, thats what happens when you eat the Vongole at Martorano.
-David
Ubuntu is great – but i think the soy comments are misplaced. In Kyoto, they’ve taken soy to an artform with myriad dishes as well as yuba. It might be a cliche in bad vegetarian restaurants but it can be a versatile, and rewarding, ingredient in the right hands.
Lol…what a terrible review.
Granted, I didn’t get past the first sentence.
Soy or lack of it has nothing to do with…anything.
What ignorance.
Totally unqualified to review “vegetarian” cuisine.