
Wheeler Del Torro, the owner of Wheeler’s Frozen Desserts Co., a Boston-Based, high-end, vegan ice cream business, will be converting his test kitchen a new full-service vegan café.
“I think people hear vegan and they think militants eating twigs and dirt! I love eating and I’m not going to create anything that doesn’t taste good,” said Wheeler a former carnivore. Well, my experience with vegan cafés shows that people think that because many of them ARE filled with militants eating twigs and dirt. So I’m really looking forward to seeing what he can do! I truly appreciate good vegetarian/vegan food the rare times I have come across it.
I believe the trick to enjoying vegan food is to try to not think of the proteins as replacements for the real thing. Faux meat does not taste like real meat, regardless of what any vegan says (though they have chicken pretty close). So if you expect the vegan protein to have the same texture as the meat, you will be dissappointed and perhaps revolted–much like the experience of picking up someone else’s drink by accident and tasting sprite when you expected coke. If you change your mindset, however, to thinking of what you’re eating as “soy texture #1″ and “soy texture #2″ rather than un-beef, and un-chicken, then you can really enjoy what vegan restaurants have to offer.
I went to the opening of Wheeler’s Frozen Desserts, and when you stopped expecting it to taste like real ice cream, it wasn’t half bad. Plus you had a bunch of flavors filled to the brim with gobs of goodness like fruit and peanut butter.
For the café, Wheeler has set out to create a series of quick-serve salads, soups and sandwiches at a comfortable price point to target both the lunchtime crowd in Boston and encourage “healthy slackers” to choose his location to hang out over their local coffee house.
The 30-seat “Wheeler’s Café & Ice Cream Bar at 334 Massachusetts Ave. will be open Monday – Saturday 11:30AM – 10:00PM and Sundays: 11:30AM – 9:00PM serving lunch, snacks time goodies and hopefully serve as a loitering-friendly spot with organic teas, couches, free Wi-Fi and occasionally feature DJ’s spinning gentle jazz, house and trip-hop.
I look forward to giving this a try with an open mind, and you should too!