For chef Vincent Peterson, food rarely tastes as good as when it’s
carrying him to a higher level of consciousness.
By Scott Edwards

I’ve been thinking a lot about water since meeting Lambertville, NJ, chef Vincent Peterson. Drinking water, specifically. I consume massive amounts of it daily, most of it at room temperature. It’s been my preference for as long as I can remember, so I never really question it anymore. But Peterson said something that made me wonder if I stumbled onto something much larger than an afterthought, much larger than me.
He’s explaining some of the basic concepts of Ayurveda, the Indian “science of life” and the foundation upon which he’s constructed his culinary life. The Agni, or digestive fire, stands at the core of the philosophy, which, in extreme layman’s terms, believes that our well-being stems from how we manage our respective fires. Keep it properly stoked and everything should be balanced. Extinguish it and you’re screwed.
Ayurveda categorizes food as either light or heavy, and the progression moves as you would expect. Meat is heavier than vegetables, beans and grains. Raw is heavier than cooked. Preserved is heavier than fresh. The heavier the food, the smaller the resulting flame. You know what extinguishes the flame outright? A glass of cold water. (In retrospect, duh.)
“It also congeals fats, which in turn makes them harder to digest,” Peterson says. “It’s winter. You’re supposed to eat warmer foods. You eat cooler foods in the summer. It’s very simple.”
Peterson favors the light foods. The lightest, in fact. He is a practicing vegetarian, personally and professionally. Peterson is no different from anyone who is committed to a spiritual life. His reasons run deeper than the face value of the food. But he wasn’t always so profound about his eating habits. He was raised on lots of Italian food, spent his childhood devouring rich sauces, pizza and hunks of meat. He was schooled at an Italian culinary institute. In Italy, no less. (He was already a vegetarian at that point, so he did a lot of tasting and spitting.)
Peterson followed a girlfriend into vegetarianism, liked the way he started to feel. But then it grew deeper, and the vegetarianism became merely a stepping stone.
That same girlfriend led him into yoga, the sister science of Ayurveda. Where Ayurveda tends to the body, yoga addresses the spirit. The more Peterson learned about yoga, the more it influenced his cooking. Before long, the two began syncing in his mind “and I began to understand all of the macro reasons for being vegetarian,” he says.

Five defining moments
A number of Peterson’s classmates at the Italian Culinary Institute for Foreigners were Californians. If you’re serious about cooking vegetarian, they said, San Francisco’s where you need to be. So after a year in Italy, he moved halfway around the world to yet another foreign city and spent the next four months trying to gain entry into the city’s – and perhaps the country’s – most renowned vegetarian restaurant, Millennium.
When the kitchen door finally opened, it grabbed him by the arm and swallowed him whole. Peterson was hired as the lead line cook with no line cooking experience, a regularly reoccurring theme in his culinary life. The pace was frantic. It was the Dot-Com Era and they were doing 200 dinners on a Tuesday night. The learning curve was steep, but the experience was also every bit as eye-opening as he anticipated. Countless ingredients that Peterson never even knew existed were at his disposal every night — $800 in exotic mushrooms, for instance — and he was being directed in how to use them by Eric Tucker, a chef whose name is gold in the vegetarian kingdom.
“Eric, for me, is definitely responsible for creating a whole new understanding of vegan cuisine,” Peterson says. “Eric trained my palate. His food is very spicy and he has such a broad repertoire, from African to Southwestern. He does it all.”
Two years later, in 2001, Peterson left Millennium to flex his muscle. He became the dinner chef at the Headlands Center for the Arts in nearby Sausalito. “That was really a crucial year because I began to figure out what my food was,” Peterson says. He had free reign and he took advantage. It was three months before anyone realized he hadn’t cooked an ounce of meat.
The arts center operated on a nine-month schedule, so when the season was up Peterson headed for Southeast Asia. He ended up staying for 11 months, during which time he cooked little and observed a lot. What he saw transformed him: entire meals cooked in one pot, a bite or two of dried meat eaten as a supplement to a dinner instead of the centerpiece. “All of this stuff just spun me 180 degrees from what I experienced in America.”
Almost the moment Peterson stepped off the plane back in San Francisco he received a call from Tucker. He was opening a second Millennium. Would Peterson be his sous chef?
The second time through he worked alongside Tucker more than under him. He was planning menus and special events now. Peterson, largely as a result of the trip, was also far more evolved philosophically than when he left three years prior, which Peterson recognized was grating on his highly caffeinated staff. “It was frustrating to have someone like me at the helm,” he says. “I was trying to impose some of the more spiritual qualities on cooking. I mean, Ayurveda, you chant over your food all day long as you prepare it. And these are all concepts where people are looking at me like I have 12 heads.”
Peterson left Millennium and restaurants altogether a year later, in 2004, and became the chef de cuisine for Back to Earth Organic Catering, an operation that grew from $86,000 in annual revenue to $1.3 million in Peterson’s three years there.
With the fundamentals beneath him and his confidence growing, Back to Earth drew Peterson even closer to his voice, forcing him to streamline and simplify. He could now cook for 250 by himself in a day-and-a-half, a quality that strangely awes his new bride.
“If I may just toot Vincent’s horn a little bit. The veggie burgers?” his wife, Carolyn Cohen, says.
“Oh, yeah,” Peterson replies.
The couple married in 2008 during a trip to India. When they returned, they staged two more ceremonies, one for their parents and another for their friends in Berkeley. Peterson catered the friends gathering. A hundred and thirty guests. They went with a picnic menu and Peterson made his apparently to-die-for veggie burgers for which he eyeballed the amount, Cohen says. “And with the last scoop, 130. And it was empty,” she says. “He scooped that thing out, stuck it on the grill and my jaw just dropped. I love telling that story because it’s amazing to me that he has the capacity for that.”

Back to Jersey
Peterson received a call while he and Cohen were in India that his father was sick. He decided when they returned and his father was still ill that he needed to return permanently to New Jersey, where he grew up in Titusville. His parents now live in Warminster. After 20 years away, Peterson was motivated by a “deep desire” to rediscover his relationship with them.
Life, of course, is rarely that simple. He wasn’t only leaving behind a huge community of friends in San Francisco, he was transplanting his new wife. (They moved in July to soften the blow, Peterson says, half-jokingly.) He was also relocating a burgeoning business. In 2005, during his downtime from catering, Peterson launched a supper club from his downtown San Francisco apartment, which it quickly outgrew. He called it Kindle Café as a nod to Agni, the Ayurveda digestive fire.
Peterson says he always “secretly” wanted to live in Lambertville. With his parents nearby, the city seemed the perfect new home for both the couple and the chef. Kindle Café, from its inception, has fostered a community style of dining. And Cohen, a longtime yoga practitioner, also teaches it. Both, they felt, would be warmly embraced there.
Peterson quickly discovered an outlet in the North Union Street café, Rojo’s. Owner J. David Waldman invited him to run the club there after hours on Friday nights, which he did until taking a break in mid-December, averaging around 20 to 25 diners each week, a third of which, he says, were regulars.
In removing much of the standard overhead and knowing how many to expect for dinner (pre-registration is necessary), Peterson conquered the impossible: launching a restaurant in the midst of a deep recession.
Even with that constant, looming uncertainty, Peterson mustered the confidence to start exploring spaces in Lambertville that he could make his own. Vegetarian is a destination cuisine, he says, and Lambertville is a destination in and of itself. Beyond that, though, he senses a fundamental shift in mindset that could only really be appreciated by someone who lived here once and has been removed from it for a significant amount of time.
“When I came home from college and told my friends I do yoga, they laughed at me,” Peterson says. “They were literally just laughing at me. And I think that’s why I stayed in California so long. And then I come back here now, nobody’s laughing.”

www.kindlecafe.com

1. we let this couple use our space in the Rago annex building on north union street for yoga.

   Posted by seymour Mondshein | January 29, 2010, 10:12 am

2. nice blog, add my knowledge

   Posted by how to plan a wedding | February 14, 2010, 11:57 pm

3. vincent and carolyn create magnificent, delicious meals each week at kindle cafe at rojos in lambertville. my husband and I are regulars, we rarely miss a friday night for the the food is truly extraordinary, the ambience very warm and inviting, and the service friendly and fun. we are all hoping Vincent achieves his dream of opening a restaurant in Lambertville, and predict there will be lines around the block to get in when it opens!

   Posted by anne trinkle | February 24, 2010, 12:33 am

4. Thank you for this article. I like you drink water without even thinking…its just part of me.

   Posted by Graphic Chick Brisbane | July 1, 2010, 6:49 pm

5. i believed raw was better for you than cooked because it keept all the nutrient untouched …and because many times the food is overcook and all the nutrients go witht he water.

   Posted by Design babe Brisbane | July 1, 2010, 6:59 pm