Essen Kitchen is no ordinary take-away. The new take-out and delivery kitchen, which opened this week in Over-the-Rhine, aims to bring a new kind of menu to the Cincinnati restaurant scene.
Sure, Essen serves up soups, salads and sandwiches like any other respectable establishment. But there aren’t any chicken Caesars or ham and swiss sammies to be found here. In fact, this kitchen doesn’t stock any meat, dairy or eggs at all: The entire menu is plant-based.
The brainchild of mother-daughter team Lida Bilokur and Patricia Bittner, Essen began with the goal of making plant-based (aka vegan) meals more fun, accessible and affordable.
“I’m never really satisfied with what I get at restaurants,” says Bittner, who keeps her diet as plant-based as possible. “For the most part, the vegetables are uninventive, uninteresting and they’re not even fully developed. They could be way more interesting. And that was the requirement that we had of our chef — that they would just be interesting.”
Enter chef Yasel López, a graduate of the University of Havana with a degree in food science and a résumé that lists stints in restaurants from Cuba to Lexington, Ky. When it came time to create the menu for Essen, he got creative and made something that would appeal to not only vegans but also vegetarians and omnivores alike.
“People feel skeptical about the ‘vegan’ word, you know? They go, ‘Oh, that’s just rabbit food. That’s just a bunch of salads,’” he says.
López plays with color and texture just as much as he experiments with flavor. At tasting events this summer, he dressed up dishes with a hot sauce foam frothed up with the aid of CO2, spicy-sweet mango tapenade and cauliflower-fennel purée. He also employs the technique of spherification, a process that turns sauces and oils into teeny-tiny little spheres that look just like caviar. Considering the fanciful presentation usually associated with fine dining, it’s easy to forget that this stuff is made for delivery.
“We wanted the food to be inventive and a little bit of a surprise,” Bittner says.
“Groundbreaking,” López adds. “That’s the word I like to use.”
Essen’s menu will change seasonally as fresh ingredients are sourced from the same small, local farms that supply produce to some of Cincinnati’s top restaurants.
“We’re working with what nature gave us,” López says. “The farmers take care of the food, right? So we as chefs should be thankful to them, first of all, and take care of the food as well. It’s a process of love and care, so you guys got that smile on your face when you eat it.”
Staples like beans, greens and grains (quinoa is a favorite here) will be utilized year-round, but customers can expect weekly specials and exciting changes with the turning of the seasons. Fall and winter menus feature pumpkins, squash and dark, leafy greens like kale, while fruits and veggies like strawberries and ramps can be expected during the spring and summer.
Some items come á la carte, but the intention is that customers will order carefully composed meals consisting of items that are meant to be paired together. Lunch boxes, which run about $15, include a main dish and two sides. Currently, they are only available for pick-up, but soon you can have Essen delivered to your door through delivery services like DoorDash and Uber Eats.
The chef himself admits that while he isn’t 100-percent vegan, his diet has begun to change after crafting Essen’s menu.
“Lately I’ve been seeking out more (plant-based foods). I’ve been stepping away from everything else,” he says. “I just realized a couple weeks ago that I don’t like beef anymore. I made myself a great steak with all the seasonings and I took two bites of it and the flavor threw me off. I was like ‘Wow, this doesn’t taste the same anymore.’”
Since they’re working with vegetables, that rabbit food thing is mostly right, Lopez points out. But the meals Essen is dishing out are plenty worthy of human palates.
“In some of the tasting events we’ve had so far, people are surprised that it’s all 100 percent plant-based,” Bittner says. “They’re completely pleasantly surprised that food can be that satisfying and that interesting without lots of butter.”
While the team at Essen skews vegan, that doesn’t mean that they’ll require the same of their customers. Dietary snobbery has no home at Essen, so don’t worry.
According to López, the point of Essen Kitchen is to get veggies back on the menu in a substantial way. “It’s not to turn the meat lovers into vegans or vegetarians completely,” he says. “It’s just to remind them of what they’re missing.”
Essen Kitchen, 1 Findlay St., Over-the-Rhine, 513-802-5013, essenkitchen.com. Hours: 11 a.m.-2 p.m. Monday-Friday.
