Our attitudes toward many foods are strongly affected by memory. Your mother fed you SpaghettiOs on Sunday afternoons while she let you wear her jewelry, for example, and you still crave the stuff. Perhaps you used to go with friends to the old Shoney’s on Piedmont several nights a week after attending AA meetings. That’s a positive memory, but perhaps you also recall asking a staff member to identify the vividly green vegetation that lined the gigantic, dirt-cheap salad bar. “It’s kale,” she said. “You’re not supposed to eat it. It’s bitter. It’s just background and it will make you shit.” I defied her and took a nibble. She was so right.
Now, kale is basically the star of all superfoods. No matter how artfully chefs try to disguise its flavor, it still tastes like feet to me, as comedian Jim Gaffigan says. So you’ll understand that it was huge when I intentionally entered the door of Kale Me Crazy, a franchise operation that has been growing like crazy in the last few years. The latest to open is in my neighborhood, Grant Park (519 Memorial Dr., 404-343-2547, KaleMeCrazy.net). It’s bright and sparsely furnished. The walls are white-washed brick painted with clever sayings like, “Don’t kale my vibe.” (But that’s exactly what kale does!) I sat at the bar while a pretty constant flow of customers came in, mainly to buy juices, which are cold-pressed on the premises.
The menu is surprisingly lengthy. Besides the juices, there are smoothies, salads, wraps, and a few random items like avocado toast and a “wild-caught tuna” poke bowl. I have to say it, but one thing impressed me hugely: The mainly green smoothies aren’t made with the usual cow’s milk and yogurt. I’ve been literally going to gyms since I was five years old, but didn’t get diagnosed as lactose-intolerant until my 20s, so those “health bars” inside gyms made me sick as hell. Kale Me Crazy uses truly dairy-free “milks” made from coconut, almonds, and hemp. That’s much more tolerable for people like me. Then again, such smoothies typically depend on additives for high protein, which is what you want after the gym. Kale Me Crazy offers several with nuts and the mysteriously named vegan protein.
Of the composed dishes, I’ve only tried the “deluxe” acai bowl. Acai berries, from a South-American palm tree, are super-trendy because their nutritional content supposedly amounts to “purple gold.” My bowl included the berries, apparently ground up with coconut milk, blueberries, cashews, and bananas. That icy puree was topped with (gluten-free) granola and everything from sliced almonds and bananas to hemp seed and goji berries. Strangely, even the wide variety of ingredients didn’t seem to bring a lot of contrasting texture or flavor, which was mainly tart.
I also tried a bottled, 2-oz. “shot” of a juice blend called Painkiller. It contains raw honey, lime, turmeric, and its cousin ginger. It was so overwhelmingly bitter and stinging that, after one tiny taste, I took the remaining home, where it sits in my refrigerator, glowing like a little thermonuclear weapon for a dollhouse. I couldn’t find a nutritional analysis. As it happens, I take curcumin, the effective anti-inflammatory extracted from turmeric, daily. If Painkiller blend is not the extract and does not include necessary ingredients to make it absorbable, its $4.50 cost is about marketing and placebo effects.
I avoided spending $145 for a three-day “cleanse package” of juices. I did pick up a few juice blends during a second visit and predictably ordered only the (delicious) fruit-based ones. In fact, when I got home, I realized something staggering – I had spent about $30 at Kale Me Krazy and avoided a single taste of kale! You can too.