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A 30-year-old Omaha vegan with personal chef and La Buvette experience plans to open a raw food, farm-to-table restaurant and farmers market called Clean Plate in a space near Slowdown in August.
Here's the really exhilarating part: It'll only be there for about three weeks. The menu will change almost constantly based on what's growing. And the space has no kitchen.
Ashland, Neb., native and Westside High School graduate Elle Lien said she hatched the idea in February when a local developer and two graphic design firms asked: “What would you do with an empty room?”
The six most creative responses are being rewarded with rotating rent-free one-month stays in what Bluestone Development, SecretPenguin and What Cheer call “Empty Room,” a vacant retail space on the lower level of the 22 Floors apartment project near 13th and Webster Streets. The first launched this month.
Lien's idea — an indoor farmers market and farm-driven, whole-food restaurant — secured the August slot.
Lien has a degree in history, but she dabbled in journalism (writing and editing for alternative news weeklies in Omaha and Charleston, S.C.) and furthered her love of food while apprenticing with James Beard-winning cookbook author Nathalie Dupree. Lien was planning to go to London for graduate school but found creative people and inspiration on a visit back home and decided to stay.
“What I realized about myself is that I would rather make something than be in a classroom passively learning,” she said. “There just seemed like so many chances to create your own thing here.”
Lien helped prepare the desserts for “The Omaha Diner” art installation/performance art/dining extravaganzas with artist Paul Renner at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in May, but she says she's not that “shock-arty” herself.
Most fare at her restaurant will be raw and vegan. And, because the space lacks certain plumbing that is necessary for a health license, the dishes will be prepared off-site. Lien said most will be created in the kitchen at Nomad Lounge or the kitchens of guest chefs.
“My core philosophy is about whole food and definitely farm to table; and I'm vegan at the moment, but I haven't always been,” she said.
“I'm a meat lover, but I'm not going to support industrially produced meat. . . . I try not to use the words vegan or raw, because I feel like they're alienating. I'd rather people just eat the food. It's not just hippie granola food. It's normal, real, delicious food.”
She plans grab-and-stay weekday lunches at long communal tables, after-hours snacks for the Slowdown crowd, Sunday brunch buffets and Saturday night reservations-only, not-necessarily-vegan-or-raw catered dinners with the help of guest chefs (and their stoves).
It's not clear where Clean Plate will go after August.
Ideally, she said, it would find a permanent home; but she can't afford restaurant overhead just yet. She's exploring taking the idea on the road with a roving Omaha-based food truck and a Twitter feed. .
“But I don't want to get ahead of myself,” she said. “I don't want to start dreaming about this thing that I really want.
“This is a month opportunity for me to audition. I'm trying to take it a day at a time and have it be as true to my original idea as possible, which was a temporary thing anyway, an experience and something that stimulates conversation about food and where food comes from and what tastes good and what we can maybe do without.”
Lien hopes to open Clean Plate in the round-windowed space facing the parking lot northeast of 13th and Webster Streets on Aug. 6.
In the meantime, she's hosting recipe- testing brunches at her home in the Little Italy neighborhood every weekend. And, as she told the sold-out, local-food crowd at FilmStreams' recent screening of the documentary “Food Fight,” she's looking for local farmers and artisan food makers who can supply her restaurant and market with fresh produce, grains, nuts, meats, dairy and more — for at least three weeks.
Lien can be reached at cleanplateomaha@yahoo.com.
Contact the writer:
444-1069, nichole.aksamit@owh.com
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