Quintessence

263 E. 10TH ST. (BETW. 1ST AVE. & AVE. A)

646-654-1823

566 AMSTERDAM AVE. (BETW. 87TH & 88TH STS.)

212-501-9700

353 E. 78TH ST. (BETW. 1ST & 2ND AVES.)

212-734-0888

I MET WENDY AT the 10th St. branch of the raw food restaurant Quintessence. Wendy's husband Ray used to drum with me, and they've been healthy for a while. Once he traded some electrical work for a series of colonics, and Wendy started working on Green Maps about 10 years ago. (Green Maps tell you about the green spaces and businesses available in more than 250 cities in 41 countries.) She also had a People's Guide to the Republican Convention map with her, which listed Bergdorf Goodman next to Tiffany's and Trump Tower as public toilets to use (women's only), as well as legal advice for protestors. In other words, she does good-a quality I used to keep at arm's length.

Dan Hoyt, owner of Quintessence, used to be part of Vital Music at the very same spot. Former engineer Jim Fourniadis remembers it fondly.

"At one point there were five of us sleeping in one loft. I still remember with a shudder when one bone-chilling January, they removed the store front for two days and we all nearly died of frostbite. Dan could always cook, though, even then. I often told him he was a better cook than an engineer, but I think he thought this was a dig on his skills, instead of a compliment to his culinary prowess."

The food is beautiful, brightly colored and meticulously laid out, the very definition of nouvelle since it was the first successful place of its kind, opening in 1999. Raw food means food that is never cooked above 118 degrees, which lets the colors stay bright. The ravioli I got with my Round the World Special ($18) was folded in turnip instead of pasta, the rice was actually seed for wild grass and the filling for ravioli was macadamia pine nut. The hummus used chickpeas that had started to sprout-making them live food-and the falafel patties had been put into a little box and dehydrated with a hairdryer-the new version of leaving them out on a porch. I also got a nori roll, which was filled with sunflower-seed paste. It all tasted new and good, except for the coconut pie, which uses only new coconuts and, of course, no sugar. Wendy, determined, said there was something she liked about it, but I am still stuck on my old path, the one sprinkled with sugar and diabetes.

Hoyt opened the restaurant partly because once he became committed to eating only raw food, there was nowhere else for him to eat. It's true that it's really hard not to consume crap, whether in the form of a whole movie about Metallica in therapy, or Yodels, which are certified kosher.

"So God thinks it's okay to eat chemicals," huffs Dan, who has a cut-rate rabbinical supervisor come by twice a month to keep his kosher rating, hardly necessary for a raw food restaurant.

There's an almost insane level of cognizance required to avoid toxins-as I suppose pizza could now be called-or food that is produced in the wrong way. There are even controversies among organic devotees. Vegans, for example, don't use honey, though Wendy pointed out four years ago they discovered that bees merely carry their honey in a pouch, and will drown if they are left alone to overproduce honey. Because of this, Quintessence uses Agave Nectar for teas, while specially marked dishes are made with honey that is humanely produced, according to the menu. Though I'm usually a fan of extremes, I'm sort of glad I missed out on the big honey debate.

I once had a boyfriend, P, who was vegan, and when we were in a diner he'd ask the waitress just how the blueberries were produced. The waitress was offended: Besides being a demanding customer, he was asking for a level of awareness that working-class America is light years away from. Same when we'd go into a Chinese take-out place for a soda-"That smell is murder!" he'd hiss indignantly, but the immigrants behind the counter were just trying to catch a break in the bowels of Jersey City. Perhaps he was right, but the problem with people who are right is that they are often not very fun.

This same fellow tipped a kid 25 cents because his whole-wheat toast took too long, leaving me with a new hypothesis: Pagans don't tip.

Dan Hoyt is more of a visionary than a kook; or perhaps visionaries are kooks in their time. In addition to franchising Quintessence, his next projects include an organic delivery service called Raw-Q, establishing a composting exchange with local farmers and SSF, or Society for a Sustainable Future. Sustainable is one of those words organic-food people use a lot, meaning that we must carry on as if there is a chance to change.

Hoyt will not serve corn, because it sits in a supermarket where aphlatoxin mold starts to grow. Peanuts, he tells me, grow with this in the ground, and are the most heavily sprayed crop on the planet. Apparently they find tons of this same mold in people with cancer. Even though I enjoy being right as much as the next guy, this is precisely the kind of information I'd rather forget. o