For Corinne Rice, part the beauty of hosting a pop up gourmet raw-vegan supper club is the opportunity to show a wide range of people the places in Detroit she finds cool and unique. Her dinner in February was at The Spiral Collective in Midtown and it certainly qualifies as a unique space.
Photos courtesy of Karpovthewreckedtrain
The Spiral Collective is normally part bookstore, part gift shop and part art gallery. The women who form the collective allowed Rice to transform their space to meet the vision she had for her Italian-themed meal, which included a formal candlelit dining experience and live music to set the proper tone for the evening.
As for the food, that is where Rice excels. She attended a culinary school in Oklahoma City that focused exclusively on the technique necessary to give raw vegan food a look that bears a strong resemblance to cooked food. Since she had been following a raw-vegan diet for a few years prior to taking the classes, the two months of 40 hours a week spent learning technique was time well spent.
Which leads into why this supper club is so innovative. It is a pop up restaurant with a primary focus on gourmet, raw-vegan food, something no other restaurant in Detroit is doing to her knowledge. Rice notes that focus can be exhausting because there is a lot of work in preparing this type of food.
The menu she developed for her last iteration of this supper club called Chartreuse sounded decedent enough to make the mouths of the most ardent carnivores water. For example, the first course was a Caprese skewer with a mozzarella made from macadamia nuts and young Thai coconut meat, drizzled with a balsamic reduction and topped with a hemp and basil pesto.
Photo courtesy of Karpovthewreckedtrain
Each course was paired with a raw juice shot, supplied by her friends at DROUGHT JUICE, a supper club staple she intends on keeping.
The next dinner for Chartreuse will be at the soon-to-be-opened SocraTea, located inside the 71 Garfield building in the Sugar Hill Arts District. The menu is Asian themed, which means that Rice will be spending plenty of time deconstructing traditional dishes to create a raw-vegan version that will impress.
Ultimately, Rice is hoping that Chartreuse will be popular enough for her to get back into teaching people how to prepare raw-vegan food. I’m hoping her hard work and exhaustion help her turn that hope into another tasty creation.
