Roman Rigatoni
This dish balances toothsome rigatoni pasta with velvety vegan béchamel and a bright and pungent pesto made with fresh oregano and pistachios, my favorite nut.
FARM TO PLATE
Deliciously, Creatively Vegan: Chive Kitchen
The doors open at 4pm for dinner at Farmington’s Chive Kitchen, and within minutes tables begin to fill. Friendly staff greet each arrival to the tiny but artfully done space, which includes a full bar to one side. At the back, a window gives a peek into what’s going on in the kitchen.
What’s coming out of that kitchen is intriguing: plates piled with fresh, seasonal vegetables and grains, complemented with sauces and garnishes, all nicely priced. Cocktails, beer and wine are here too. Chef-owner Suzy Silvestre has combined her Portuguese heritage, her California background and her quest for healthy eating to come up with an original take on vegan cooking. Opened in 2015, Chive Kitchen is Silvestre’s first foray into the restaurant business.
“It’s just something I always wanted to do,” she says. “I always liked to cook.” Growing up in the San Francisco Bay area, “I ate everything and everywhere. I love taking all that and making it vegan.” Now a Farmington Hills resident, she chose downtown Farmington because, she says, “I believe there should be good, artisanal food outside big cities.”
Growing up, her Portuguese family’s menu favored meat, potatoes and seafood. “I think that definitely helps with knowing how things are supposed to taste,” she says. But a er a bout of colitis, she felt a change was required. Eating vegan, it turned out, made all the difference. That realization “took me up to a whole other level of cooking. at was a stretch. You really have to think a lot about what you do.”
The menu on any given evening may include words like steak, burger or chorizo; they are there to hint at the inspiration behind the dish. “It was an evolution as I wrote the menu,” Silvestre says. The‘chorizo,’ for example, includes lentils and chickpeas. “It really feels like chorizo.” Seitan is made in house. Silvestre calls tofu “a brilliant medium. The tofu we get is GMO-free, it’s made in Michigan and it’s gluten-free.”
Sources are local as much as possible. Beaverland Farms, Mushroom Factory, Ice Cream Plant, Rosewood Farms, Neu Kombucha and Cherry Capital Foods are among the Michigan suppliers. All six taps offer drafts from Michigan breweries, including B. Nektar in Ferndale and Farmington Brewing Company. Spirits from Michigan predominate, including Eastern Market’s Detroit City Distillery.
The bar menu undergoes a complete change three times a year. Surprisingly, spirits, beer and wine cannot be assumed to be vegan, and phone calls to French wineries to vet their processes and ingredients are not out of the question. “Initially I wanted to do Michigan wines,” Silvestre says. But she has added Portuguese, French and California selections to the wine list in consideration of the flavors coming out of the kitchen.
CHEF/OWNER SUZY SILVESTRE
“All spirits we have to check and confirm. Wines are the biggest troublemakers,” she says. “We spend a lot of time researching … to come up with something we are proud of.”
Chive Kitchen’s manager, Michelle Clendening, herself a vegetarian, estimates that 30–40 percent of customers are not vegan; rather, they come to try something new and different. Maybe half of regular customers are vegan.
"There's people that have been vegan for a day, vegan for a year,” Silvestre says. Eating vegan “is definitely growing.” An aging population and increased awareness of animal rights are likely contributing factors. “I think the biggest issue is the way animal farming has spawned to a level that’s huge and disgusting.” Even so, “ That whole word ‘vegan’ is scary to people, I guess. I’m very much ‘to each his own.’ No one’s going to eat or learn if you’re shoving stuff down their throat.”
No danger of that here. Combinations of ingredients and attention to detail make each plate tasty and appealing. On a spring day, the menu includes fat asparagus spears, delicate baby artichokes, a thick Romesco sauce made with crushed almonds, roasted Portabella mushroom caps, tostadas, even French fries. Sauces and garnishes (including, appropriately, a whole chive blossom) accompany each dish. Traditional steak frites was never quite like this.
There is also dessert. Clendening says their chocolate beet cake is the top seller. “People come from miles around,” she says. Gluten-free, it’s made with almonds, is incredibly moist—and doesn’t taste remotely of beets.
Chive Kitchen offers many gluten-free options. For example, a roux is made with brown rice our rather than wheat our. But “being a vegan chef, you cook with a lot of allergens—soy, gluten, nuts,” Silvestre says. Do that in a tiny kitchen, and cross contact with allergens is an issue.
“I have a real good understanding about it because of what I’ve been through,” she says. “Still, I have to stay true to the dishes. It’s a balance. Every time I work a recipe, I say, ‘How can I make this nut-free?’ “At the end of the day, the menu is my ideas,” she says. “It’s something I invented for them. At the end of the day, it’s not Applebee’s or another chain restaurant.”
Chive Kitchen is open for dinner only, Wednesday through Saturday. Brunch is added on the weekend. The dining room seats 46; a seasonal patio adds 22.
“We can get pretty crazy in here, and the patio is nice; it helps with the overflow,” Silvestre says.
CHIVE KITCHEN
33043 Grand River Ave., Farmington
248-516-7144
ChiveKitchen.com
Related Stories & Recipes