To make in a 10-inch skillet, cut the amount of ingredients in half. This recipe, which is made in a 14-inch skillet is enough to feed a crowd or to have plenty of leftovers for an easy workday breakfast. “I want to make the best damned pizza around.” “I’m going to bat those out of the park,” he said. But in a nod to the storefront’s history, White said he’ll add pizza at the Sebastopol location, with a lofty goal for his vegan pies. The menu, when the new restaurant opens in the spring, will be largely the same as at the Mendocino Avenue location. White said many of his most ardent supporters are meat eaters. We’re no-animals.”īut Cozy Plum’s comfort-food niche may help devoted omnivores give up some of their carnivorous delights. “We’re not claiming to be a health-food restaurant. “Vegan does not equal health,” White said. Some would argue these products are highly processed and unhealthy. To create some dishes, White uses what he calls “transitional” products that are plant-based, like Just Egg or Impossible grounds that he enhances with other ingredients to get them to his liking. “We didn’t have onion rings, so I put on mushrooms instead,” he said.Ĭozy Plum’s new breakfast sandwiches help fill the niche of another love he left behind: the Breakfast Jack at Jack in the Box. The BBQ bacon cheddar burger is White’s homage to the Western Bacon burger at Carl’s Jr. “The queso was an effort to mimic the cheese sauce at 7-11 when I was a drunken 21-year-old.” “A lot of the foods I’ve created are quietly mimicking fast food, but nobody knows it,” White said. The menu at Cozy Plum is full of foods you actually hanker for - like burgers, nachos or macaroni and cheese. “What I discovered, at every restaurant in the Bay Area, there was one or two things on the menu that I loved, but ultimately I was craving something else,” he said. Wherever those rides took him, he’d check out restaurants in the area with plant-based menus. White picked up a side hustle as a driver for Uber and Lyft. The Mendocino Avenue spot was affordable, and White opened the door to a new career. Opportunity knocked when Gaia’s Garden, a vegetarian restaurant, went up for sale. Friends told him he should open a restaurant. He made and shared videos of his kitchen experiments. Click here to view this embed.Īt home, he was constantly tinkering with recipes, trying to come up with plant-based versions of his favorite foods. This device is unable to display framed content. But there were times when I was having to do things I didn’t want to do anymore.” “I started educating people on integrative pest control so I wouldn’t have to use poison. “I couldn’t be exterminating as a vegan,” he said with a laugh. Then, about a month into plant-based eating, he had what he calls an epiphany. He did it, first and foremost, for his health. On Father’s Day 2017, this father of a son and two stepchildren went meat-free forever. It was during his 18 months in this job that he made another life-altering decision. He gave up his car-detailing business, which he had operated for 20 years, for a job that offered consistent income and benefits. “That progression walked me right into plant-based (eating).” “Getting rid of milk, getting rid of soda, getting rid of fast food, starting to lessen portions, starting to eat local, staring to eat fruits and vegetables - and it was just little by little,” White said. In 2015, he started making small, incremental dietary changes. At times, he drank a gallon of milk a day. He had heart problems, diabetes and high blood pressure.Ī typical dinner for him consisted of a large pan-fried steak, a tub of macaroni salad and a 2-liter bottle of root beer. Less than a decade ago, White was morbidly obese, tipping the scales at 394 pounds. His journey to become the owner of Santa Rosa’s plant-based eatery of record is a long, strange trip. “(I want to) offer options for people in any kind of a mood.”įor those in the mood for a plant-based breakfast, Cozy Plum recently started offering grab-and-go breakfast options which include bacon, egg and cheese sandwiches burritos and a hearty, veggie-packed frittata - all of it plant-based. “My pledge was to come up with a menu where I wanted to eat everything on the menu,” White said. Yet Cozy Plum survived and continues to grow. White, along with his best friend and business partner, Lisa Le Donne, were rookie restaurant owners and opened just days before the pandemic lockdown. In that time, it has faced seemingly insurmountable odds. But for almost three years, Cozy Plum Bistro on Mendocino Avenue in Santa Rosa has offered diners a paradigm shift to the possibilities of plant-based eating. Maybe the words “vegan restaurant” bring to mind a burger-less, burrito-less hellscape. For the first 47 years of his life, Charles White III ate what he wanted, He had a penchant for fast-food burgers and convenience-store nacho cheese.
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