The chef couple behind Vedge talk about their new cookbook: For them, it's personal

Kate Jacoby and Rich Landau are the pioneering chefs behind the vegetable restaurants Vedge and V Street and the soon-to-open fast food concept Wiz Kids. They have a new cookbook, V Street, 100 Globe-Hopping Plates on the Cutting Edge of  Vegetable Cooking (William Morrow). The couple spoke last week  at the Free Library of Philadelphia.

Did you foresee vegan and vegetarian cooking growing the way that it has?

Rich: What I understood early on is that people love good food. People were under the assumption that meat gave food the flavor. It's really not - it's what chefs do with it that makes it delicious. So I set out to put the same kind of flavor into vegetables, to really focus on what is on the plate and not make excuses or apologize for what wasn't.

Kate: In the early days, we saw the struggle of the stereotype of being a vegan or vegetarian restaurant. And we tried very actively to disrupt that, and to offer something different.  It is a beautiful happening, that people are - for health, animal rights, for the environment - approaching this with a new energy.

Talk about what it is like to work with your business partner and spouse.

Kate:  First, things got divided between  front and back of the house. Then I picked up the pastry and the beverage program.  I was such a huge fan of his cooking, and it really informed me, balancing flavors and making  something craveable. We have a very similar palate that we continue to develop with travel. I think we trust each other and understand what we are best at.

Rich: Dividing up the work is really key. We are each other's biggest fans and each other's biggest critics, and if it is handled with love and respect, it's not really a problem.

You won national acclaim for elevating vegan cooking to fine dining. Why go in the opposite direction with street food?

Rich: Kate and I cherish going to white tablecloth restaurants and being pampered. But we also love the other experience: a sand floor, little wooden table, smoke billowing out from the roof of a little shack. But we're also following where the market is going. It is very millennial-driven: they want great quality ingredients, cooked by a chef, at a fair price without a lot of pretense, in three minutes.

How do you develop flavors in vegetables?

Rich: For instance, if you take our whole roasted carrots at Vedge, those carrots are first blanched in a stock with thyme, bay leaf, and peppercorn. After they cool, they are split in half and roasted in the oven facedown so that they caramelize, with a bit of Montreal steak spice and sunflower oil.  After that, they go onto the char grill, where we get some mesquite, cherry and apple woods smoking and we put some grill marks on it, and let the smoke get up in there.  And then they are chilled, allowing the texture of the carrot to set.  Finally, it goes on the plancha, the flat-top griddle, to get one more layer of caramelization. So, by doing all that, we are doing the same amount of work a lot of chefs would put into a protein. That's how we try to stay convincing on the plate

And what about at V Street? The flavors are so much bolder than Vedge.

Kate: When we would travel, and we would try this really spicy dish, like Kung Pao, was a  revelation to us. But it doesn't quite fit into the Vedge experience, so V Street was born.

Rich:  V Street is a small space; it doesn't have to be all things to all people. We we were trying to hone in on people who craved excitement and spice and adventure on their plate. It's not a baked-potato kind of restaurant.

And the recipes from the V Street book, are they approachable?

Kate:  Across the board, these are almost too good. I fear people are just going to stay home and make this food.   This is not an authentic Hungarian cookbook, or Szechuan Chinese, but under the vegan umbrella that I think people do trust us to carry, we can translate different food cultures from around the world.

Can you talk about where your motivation comes from?

Rich: We are chefs first. But we got into this very much for ethical reasons.  When I first found out where a steak comes from, I was like, "Why are we eating this stuff?"  The greenhouse gases caused by cows are one of the biggest threats to the environment, and then  it is also about personal health. So if you can't do it for the environment, and you can't do it for the animals, do it for yourself!

Kate: I think ethics are the number one driver for us.  And yet, we know what it is like when people preach to you. We are just trying to make food so good and so appealing that people want to try it.  We will  catch each other's eye on a Saturday night, and there is this buzzing dining room full of people. I don't know how many are vegan and how many had steak for lunch. But they are all here right now. And that is, for us, very personally rewarding.

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