Brenda Beener’s family roots go back to New Orleans, and the food she grew up with — crayfish and shrimp, the bounty of the bayous and the Gulf of Mexico — did not prepare her for the day her husband announced, “I’m just going to eat plants now.”
As the cook in the family, Ms. Beener rallied, pondered and experimented. Two decades later, she is sharing her inventions with the world as the chef of Seasoned Vegan in Harlem, a restaurant that specializes in vegan soul food and sees no contradiction between those terms, that debunks the notion of veganism as a sacrifice.
Consider Ms. Beener’s take on burdock, a thistlelike weed born in Siberia and northern Europe, with a hardscrabble capacity to thrive almost anywhere. (Its prickly, obstinately clingy burrs were the template for Velcro.) On its own, the root has the approximate meatiness of mushrooms and artichokes. Here, it’s been pulverized, reconstituted with spices unnamed (trade secret), drenched in a meld of barbecue sauce and rémoulade, and tucked into a warm, chewy pretzel bun.
It’s got that seesaw of sweet and tang, a meld of pulped tomato, vinegar and sugar pressed from organic beets. The bread righteously puffs and sinks. And the burdock, credited as “crawfish” on the quotation-mark-happy menu, is believable in the role.
Then again, the burdock could as easily pose as chicken, like the fermented soy in nuggets with dark gold, featherweight panko crusts. The texture convinces, but it’s the salt and crunch that carry the day, the seethe of oil in the fryer that has the power to set everything right.
Fermented soy also shows up as tuna, shredded and snug inside a band of nori, topped by a daub of mayonnaise. It has a satisfying funk, even if it doesn’t quite conjure the deeps.
Fleshy fried “shrimp,” stuffed in a po’ boy, go through a more dramatic metamorphosis: They’re engineered from konjac, a fiber-rich tuber that is close to zero in calories and, in its native state, entirely tasteless. What it does best is absorb flavors, in this case seaweed’s wistful, half-remembered brine. And the vegetable’s stores of glucomannan, a viscous fiber that works as a thickener and binder, give the shrimp a touch of bounce — and dupe the stomach into feeling full.
Ms. Beener started Seasoned Vegan as a pop-up in 2010, with the help of her son, Aaron Beener, who had returned from Spain with a master’s degree in linguistics and a plan to become a court interpreter. Instead, he joined his mom, cooking at a commercial kitchen in the Bronx and then selling their dishes alongside old-school butter-dough rugelach at Lee Lee’s Baked Goods on West 118th Street.
They opened the restaurant in 2014 in a corner storefront with windows overlooking St. Nicholas Avenue, after raising $22,000 through Kickstarter and winning a $5,000 prize from the Harlem Business Alliance. (“Conventional banks wouldn’t help,” Mr. Beener said.)
The neighborhood was waiting. Most nights, the dining room gets crowded early and stays that way. A note on the menu says, “Please limit dining times to 90 min.” Nevertheless, the servers field newcomers’ questions patiently. They act as if they had all the time in the world, and sometimes the cooks do, too; don’t expect food in a hurry.
Half the pleasure of eating like this, for nonvegans at least, is the surprise and disbelief. Faux crawfish, ersatz shrimp: They’re less a matter of alchemy and transfiguration than sleight of hand in a circle of sawdust. The rabbit pops out of the hat. You want to clap.
At the same time, it can be hard to judge dishes on their own merits and not compare them to their counterparts in the world of meat. The question isn’t, Does it taste as good as the original? Just: Does it taste good?
Much of it, yes, although it would take someone on a higher plane of being than I to appreciate mac ’n’ cheese in which the cheese (arrowroot-based) has attained stretch but not quite creaminess, or to willingly return to the mulchy undertow of raw “bread” forged out of dehydrated flaxseeds and onions.
Still, any doubts vanish at the end of the meal. For here is ice cream, the cream supplanted and possibly surpassed by almond milk. Thick and rich, a scoop of it rests like a boulder between two equally mighty cookies. It tastes like the real thing. No: It is the real thing.
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