Napa restaurant and yoga studio offers unique combination of extraordinary “vegetable cuisine” and physical fitness

By Leslie Harlib

Photos: Leslie Harlib

At 9 a.m. on a sauna-warm October Friday, Ubuntu’s executive chef/partner Jeremy Fox examines produce in the middle of a two-acre vegetable garden and orchard. Plumes of magenta amaranth nod over him. Cape gooseberries beckon plumply from leafy bushes. Swiss chard springs from the ground in rainbow stalks with bonnets of ruffled leaves. Ripe bronze Seckel pears hang like Christmas ornaments from low trees. More than 30 types of heirloom tomatoes add their distinctive pungent scent to the fragrant dirt-sweetened air.

Working closely with head gardener Rose Robertsen, Fox chooses a lavish harvest that he will transform into the day’s lunch and dinner dishes at Ubuntu, the combination restaurant and yoga studio in downtown Napa that turned two-years-old in August.

Arguably the only restaurant/fitness facility of this kind in the United States, the restaurant side has garnered international rave reviews and already earned a Michelin star even though it serves only vegetables. Winning the star is almost unheard of for such a young restaurant, especially one with such an esoteric concept.

As Fox puts it, “This is not vegetarian or vegan. It is a vegetable restaurant. My cuisine is vegetable cuisine.” “What makes Ubuntu so special is Jeremy’s treatment of the vegetables to the point where the food is so unique, you don’t expect these flavors,” explains Michael “Bug” Deakin of Heritage Salvage in Petaluma, who made most of Ubuntu’s furniture from salvaged wood.

Deakin says he so loved Ubuntu’s dual-purpose concept, he took part of his payment in trade so he could dine there monthly. “Sometimes I’ll take a bite of one of Jeremy’s dishes and the flavors are so amazing, you can’t believe that it’s just vegetables.”

Part of what makes Fox’s cuisine so distinctive is the fact that he forages from the ultimate natural supermarket — the earth. His ingredients are plucked from the ground, seasoned and plated in as little as a couple of hours.

And as North Bay Edens go, this one’s spectacular. Terraced beds undulate along low, rolling hills that boast a view of the Mayacamas Mountains; the soil looks like cocoa powder so rich it would hold pride of place at Willy Wonka’s candy factory. More than 80 types of produce, many of them collaborated on by Fox in conjunction with consulting master gardener Jeff Dawson, spring from acreage that’s only been a sustainably farmed organic garden for the past two years. An added plus: the land’s just six miles from downtown Napa. Ubuntu’s founder and owner, Sandy Lawrence, owns it and lives on it.

It was Lawrence’s devotion to a healthy lifestyle that started the whole project. Reed-slender, with golden hair and an athletic body, Lawrence is a long-time Napa resident who has practiced yoga for over 20 years. She is also fascinated by Ayurvedic medicine and healing through food.

The story of how she created Ubuntu is a perfect illustration of the time-honored adage, ‘find a niche and fill it.’ At her home outside Napa, where Fox’s garden now grows, she would frequently hold yoga retreats for up to 20 people from around the world. She’d hire a chef to prepare vegetarian food for the participants, “but we found that people wanted to go out because this was Napa, associated with great food and wine,” Lawrence recalls. “The problem was, it wasn’t always easy to find a vegetarian meal for 20 people at one of the nice restaurants in Napa Valley. Usually something was missing or unsatisfying.”

After also hosting numerous salons in her home that would draw as many as 100 guests and after hearing scores of healthoriented friends lament the fact that there wasn’t a great local restaurant for vegetarian cuisine, she decided to start one herself. As she puts it, “I thought it would be a good idea to provide something world class that was also a little bit different than most of the businesses here in Napa. You might find something like this in a major city. For Napa, it was very unusual.”

What helped put Ubuntu on the world’s culinary map was Fox’s commitment to Lawrence’s dream of high-end, beautifully crafted vegetable dishes created almost entirely with locally and organically grown seasonal produce. Fox, 33, paid kitchen dues in a wide range of restaurants including Rubicon in San Francisco and most importantly, five years at Manresa in Los Gatos, where he was chef de cuisine. Fox says he was enormously influenced by Manresa’s executive chef and owner David Kinche’s devotion to seasonal, sustainably grown produce and dishes that showcase the essence of their ingredients.

“What I’m doing now at Ubuntu, it’s the manifestation of so many things,” says Fox, who also enjoys eating meat and carries a wallet that looks like a giant strip of bacon. “In terms of what I cook, I’m inspired by food I’ve eaten, music I’ve heard, movies I’ve seen. I became a chef because I went to see the movie ‘Big Night’ and knew I wanted to go to culinary school.”

What Fox loves about cooking for Ubuntu is the passion. “It’s not just from me, it’s from everybody here. We all want the atmosphere to be warm, welcoming. We didn’t want the usual restaurant cliches of infighting. All our cleaning products are green. Everything in the deÅLcor is recycled. It’s more than a job. It’s a way of life.”

Fox’s wife Deanie is Ubuntu’s pastry chef (they met while both working at Manresa). She, too, is gifted, creating such dishes as individual Mason jars layered with carageenanthickened fresh cheesecake topped with huckleberry/ blueberry/raspberry compote, nut/seed crunch and softly whipped cream. It is impossible not to finish one of her cheesecakes; they are as satisfying as any entreÅLe despite their gentle sweetness. The couple lives two blocks away from the restaurant and they walk to work.

Fox’s devotion to the garden, to the kitchen, to the extraordinary artistry of turning out a completely new menu every day based on what’s freshly harvested, is reminiscent of a monastic lifestyle. He’s far from chained to soil and stove, however. A rave review in the New York Times in February 2009 and the recently won Michelin star have kept Ubuntu’s phones ringing off the hook, turned the restaurant from teetering on the edge of closing to an international success, and given Fox opportunities to cook on a national stage — on TV with Martha Stewart, for instance, and for the James Beard House in New York. He’s currently writing a lavishly photographed cookbook to be published by Artisan Press in 2011.

Ubuntu — loosely, the name means community serving community — works as well as it does because it embodies a level of thoughtful integration. What we’re all looking for in our lives — balance — seems to have a practical application here. You see it in the property itself, with its recycled materials, stone walls, communal table for 22, and huge posters celebrating Buddhism and nature and containing mindful phrases. You feel it in the upstairs yoga studio with its state of the art equipment and expert teachers inviting you to move at your own pace. It’s obvious in the open kitchen where Fox’s team of three line cooks painstakingly craft dish after dish.

Ubuntu at its most basic is a relief from stress. You can take a yoga class upstairs and, still in your sweats, come downstairs and have a meal.

From seed to stalk to stove to a starring role on menu and plate — that’s the journey vegetables make at Ubuntu. I sampled whole red-and-white radishes as tiny as a toddler’s thumbnail, sweet and acidic, teamed with dots of spicy mustard sauce and a rubble of black volcanic salt crystals. I marveled at a green heirloom tomato broth, aromatic with shiso leaf, bathing a wee cluster of baby tomatoes, squashes, turnips, apple slices and slivers of pickled gherkin. Nuggets of deep-fried chickpeas crisped by frothy batter and striated with Spanish Romesco sauce were so innovative in flavor and lusty in texture, they tasted like something Picasso would have served to friends at cocktail time.

“I think it’s the most amazing food I’ve ever eaten,” says Ubuntu’s consulting gardener Dawson. “Ubuntu has the potential to be a model for other restaurants because it’s incredibly innovative. A lot of people thought it wouldn’t work, but it has. Fox has taken vegetarian cuisine and stood it on its head. That vegetables can be like this, it’s a way to expand your mind, not just your palate.”

Ubuntu Restaurant and Yoga Studio is at 1140 Main St. in downtown Napa. 707.251.5656, www.ubuntunapa.com. Currently operating on winter hours—Dinner is served Thursday through Sunday, 5:30 PM to 9 PM; lunch is served Saturday and Sunday, 11:30 AM to 2:30 PM. The Ubuntu Annex store at 1130 Main St., Napa, is open Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday noon to 6PM, Thursdays noon to 8 PM; Fridays 11 AM to 8 PM; Saturdays 11 AM to 8 PM, and Sundays 11 AM to 6 PM. Check their website for the current schedule of classes.

Leslie Harlib has been a food writer and lifestyle journalist since 1976, and was food writer/restaurant columnist for the Marin Independent Journal for 14 years.