The new wrinkle is personal.
A little more than a year ago, Brasure said she went to the doctor’s office and “they came back with some pre-diabetic numbers.”
Brasure talked with her pastry chef, Laurie Donaldson.
“Laurie is vegan,” Brasure said. “I remember when she first started working here. I was having some health problems. She was a die-hard vegan. I didn’t understand vegan 100 percent — no meat, no dairy, no honey.”
Donaldson gave her a DVD. “It was called ‘Forks Over Knives,'” Brasure said. “I watched it and I went ‘Wow.’ I changed my diet immediately and my numbers went down. I felt great. I had more energy than I knew what to do with. I lost 30 pounds.”
Becoming a vegan made going out to eat with her friends and family challenging. Brasure wants to make sure vegans and nonvegans have plenty of good options at Bleu Door. There is a vegan happy hour once a month promoted by Vegan Couv. The regular breakfast and lunch menu have many vegan options (like a vegan Caesar salad and harvest hash). Many of the items on the menu can be made vegan by request (like the Mediterranean platter and the garden veggie sandwich). The brunch menu has vegan Benedict, vegan waffles and vegan biscuits and gravy — made with a vegan “veal” stock demi-glaze from Switzerland.
On Thursdays, the menu is filled with vegan specials like Brasure’s amazing vegan mac and cheese with a side of stewed tomatoes. The stewed tomatoes on the side are a New England thing (Brasure grew up in Lewes, Del.). She explained, “I always scoop the mac and cheese to the side and dump the tomatoes in the center. I don’t mix it all up because it gets kind of weird. It’s almost like that penne vodka sauce. You get that creamy tomato thing.”
After talking to Brasure, I became obsessed with the vegan mac and cheese. I have tried, and tried to make, vegan mac and cheese and it was a disappointing failure. Bleu Door’s vegan mac and cheese is a revelation — creamy, delicious, and comforting. It is the best thing (vegan or nonvegan) I have eaten in a while and I wish I was eating it right now.
Bleu Door occasionally has wine dinners at night. The cafe is transformed for fine dining. A long communal table draped in white linen replaces the everyday cafe layout. At the last dinner, in October, the entire menu was vegan.
“The entire meal from soup to nuts was vegan and everybody raved about it,” Brasure said. “I served one of my best entrees, it was absolutely amazing. I still dream of this food.”
The entree was a handmade pasta with vegan hazelnut cream and chanterelle mushrooms with a Georgia candy roaster squash puree. The next wine dinner will be March 10 with Reustle-Prayer Rock Vineyards. The six-course meal offers a little peek behind the new Bleu Door menu. Classics like seafood bisque with cr?me fraiche are served on the same menu as veg-forward dishes like a salad of roasted beets and baby kale topped with spiced pecans with a sweet cherry vinaigrette. If you eat any vegan dishes, I have a feeling you won’t even know — you’ll just want more.
Email Rachel at couveeats@gmail.com. You can follow her on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram @couveeats.
