Cuisine Scene: Beauty and the to-go raw feast
Leslie Harlib (live link)
Article Launched: 01/22/2008 09:11:40 PM PST

Roxanne Klein of Roxanne's Fine Cuisine launches her line of packaged products. (IJ photo/Alan Dep)
Roxanne Klein, the classically trained raw cuisine chef, author of the cookbook "Raw," written with Charlie Trotter, and owner of the now-defunct internationally renowned haute cuisine restaurant Roxanne's in Larkspur, is cooking again. On Monday, she launches a line of packaged raw food products.
Ê A photo of a smiling Klein - dressed in chef's whites that set off the lean 43-year-old's miles of butter-and-honey-colored hair and movie-star good looks - is on each package. Her picture is also on the distinctive stand-alone cases, made of pressed banana leaves and glass, that will hold her factory-produced organic foods in each store that carries the recyclable packages.

"I want people to look at all these foods with the message that,

A triple layer chocolate torte. (IJ photo/Alan Dep)
you can have it all and have the best for your body," Klein says. "Putting my picture on everything says that I personally vouch for the integrity of the products."
Called Roxanne's Fine Cuisine, the line of 34 items includes trail mix, granola, sandwiches, cheeses, hummus, snacks, ice creams and cake. All are vegan, dairy- and wheat-free and sweetened with agave nectar, barley malt, maple syrup or honey. None have been "cooked" beyond 118 degrees, the temperature at which raw food can be heated or dehydrated and still retain its healthful enzymes, Klein explains.
They'll be stocked in 40 stores around from Mendocino to Monterey, including Woodlands, Whole Foods, Good Earth, Andronico's and Paradise Markets in Marin. Ultimately, Klein hopes, her line will be sold nationwide.

It's a big leap from the esoteric haute dishes she served at Roxanne's, the high-concept, eco-friendly restaurant she and former husband Michael launched in 2002, to her new grab-and-go selection of mass-produced raw prepared foods. Some are shelf-stable; others aren't because raw fresh foods are fragile.

The Kleins' separation and divorce coincided with the closure of the restaurant in 2004.

For the past two years, Roxanne Klein and business partners Larry Brucia of San Anselmo, credited with inventing trail mix, and Neil Blomquist of Sonoma, a former Spectrum Foods executive, have been developing her packaged products.

The idea grew out of the popular Roxanne's to-go deli of her former restaurant. "I always wanted to do something like this," she says.

I sampled some of Klein's line in her new Kentfield hillside home that overlooks Mount Tamalpais, a forest of trees and the terraced organic vegetable gardens she's developing. Roxanne and Michael reconciled in June - they're now engaged - and share the house with their children.

The new foods are potent: Almost as complex in flavors and textures as the items at her former restaurant. Particularly good: Trail mix of

These are Roxanne's Fine Cuisine's Tu-nut pinwheel sandwches, raw sprouted grain bread wrapped around lettuce, carrots and a tuna salad-like paste of ground sprouted almonds and sunflower seeds, (IJ photo/Alan Dep)
dehydrated carrots and corn as well as Himalayan goji berries and cashews; vanilla almond sprouted grain and nut granola that tastes like crumbled crunchy cookies; velvety Boursin-like nut milk and garlic cheese spread that's packaged with pre-sliced carrot and celery sticks for dipping; chocolate and vanilla nut milk-based ice creams, not quite as creamy as the restaurant versions but still smooth and remarkably like traditional ice cream; and triangles of fudgy chocolate cake layered with coconut.
Products will retail from $6.99 to $8.99. While that sounds expensive, raw foods, thanks to their sprouted nut bases, tend to be rich. A package of two Tu-nut pinwheels, raw sprouted grain bread wrapped around lettuce, carrots and a tuna salad-like paste of ground sprouted almonds and sunflower seeds, is amazingly filling and would make a hearty lunch. One box of chocolate cake, packaged in two triangles, is so intense it would feed four people.