An Element of Fun

The Plantry Café enchants Baton Rouge with plant-based possibilities

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Probably the hardest part of hbeing an adult who can now happily eat vegetables—if not always as many as you should—is having kids to whom you have to pretend you’ve always revered rutabaga and basked in the beauty of brussels sprouts. When hypocrisy doesn’t motivate, and I run out of gold stars, and my fridge is bare of ice cream, I may just follow family medicine doctor and Plantry Café owner Katie Crifasi’s example and cut down a tree.

The tree, an unexpected centerpiece inside the Bluebonnet Boulevard restaurant, is painted black now and festooned with white flowers. Under its canopy, my seven-year-old dreamily nibbles on a maitake mushroom slider and smacks down a sip of probiotic cola. Such is the power of the Plantry Café and its enchanting atmosphere, where a diner at Baton Rouge’s elegant, and entirely plant-based, restaurant feels like they’ve just missed the tardy White Rabbit as he hops past to his next appointment.

This environment is by design. Crifasi opted for an element of adventure and fantasy in the Plantry, believing that a healthy restaurant doesn’t need to feel like a hospital. But it was her patients’ well-being that drew the doctor toward opening a plant-based restaurant of her own. “I was seeing that people were more interested in taking supplements than prescriptions,” said Crifasi, who picked up a subspecialty in integrative medicine, or holistic care, to complement a conventional approach.

[Read about other planty-focused culinary experiences in these other stories by Lucie Monk Carter—"Earthly Delights: Baton Rouge's new BLDG5 boasts unbeatable, bountiful beauty" and "Scratch Farm Kitchen: Meals with zeal in downtown Lafayette". 

Crifasi, a Baton Rouge native, has spent years working in travel medicine and living in big cities across the country where plant-based restaurants are in abundance and variety. “In Philadelphia, there was even a plant-based bar I’d go to called Charlie Was a Sinner.” She was visiting family in Baton Rouge when the pandemic broke out and kept her in town. She soon started a small consulting firm of hospitalists, Rowe Consultants, serving Our Lady of the Lake and the Spine Hospital. Faced with a relative dearth of the cleaner, healthier eating options she’d enjoyed in other places—and knowing her patients were suffering from this lack too—she decided she’d open a restaurant as a side project. “I think that unless you have dining options to show people any differently, then you just keep treating the same heart attacks in people's thirties and forties and strokes in their fifties,” said Crifasi. “You have to have a place for people to support their health goals, or having a talk with somebody about their health is just a moot point. I mean, we can have a conversation about how your cholesterol is high, your blood pressure is high, and anything else, and it doesn't matter if you don't have places to go . . . So that's how I came to develop the Plantry. It's probably one of the best things I've done with my contributions, I think, to society so far.”

To describe the café’s menu and approach, she’s careful to use the term “plant-based” as opposed to “vegan.” “Oreos are vegan, because they don’t use any animal products, but they don’t come from an Oreo tree,” said Crifasi. “I do like to be clear that we're not just avoiding animal products, we're trying to actually [not use] artificial dyes and chemical grown food here. We’re not here to do imitation chicken and a bunch of Beyond Burgers, not that there’s anything wrong with that. I just want to actually show people what you can do with food, not try to pretend to be something else each time along the way.”

I’m eight months pregnant at this writing, and a little fatigued at everything in general, but also by the long list of things I ought not to consume. The Plantry is a reminder that dietary conscience can be an elevated experience. Here I am a vaunted guest at the garden party and not some poor slob watching other people eat prosciutto. The utensils are gold and the napkins pumpkin-hued as my daughter and I make our way through tastes of beet ceviche, a warmly spiced butternut squash soup, the seasonal fall salad, and a slider trio. The sliders particularly delight my dining companion, who left to her own devices would subsist on cinnamon toast and Cheez-Its. Faced with a beet burger, BBQ jackfruit, and maitake mushroom, she declares each better than the last. (She seems particularly enthusiastic over the textural transformation of a beet into a burger, far preferring this over the chilled beet ceviche.)

“ I just want to actually show people what you can do with food, not try to pretend to be something else each time along the way.” —Katie Crifasi 

Serenity rules in the front of the house and back. Restaurants can be abusive places where tensions run high in the kitchen. Crifasi is deliberate in her hiring process in finding individuals who won’t introduce the bad behaviors they may have learned elsewhere. “It doesn't matter how positive of a culture I have, if people in a certain industry are accustomed to using profanity as they feel like it, or are accustomed to yelling at each other, they’ll recreate what they know. And I’m not going to tolerate that.”

With the new year, Crifasi will be expanding to grab-and-go options and even a subscription meal service. Monthly tea parties are already a popular occurrence, and there’s a regular who aims to use the Plantry as a wedding venue.

I ask if she’s had anyone approach for tips on opening their own plant-based restaurant in Baton Rouge. Not yet, said Crifasi, “but there was someone starting a bar who asked how I installed the tree.” She’s keeping that information proprietary. “That was a cool thing I did; I’m not going to tell you how. Get your own ideas!” 

plantrycafe.com.