Where’s the beef? Not at the Berwyn Café

Vegan alternatives offered

Thursday, May 11, 2006

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by Dennis Carter

Staff Writer

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Barbara L. Salisbury⁄The Gazette

Berwyn Café co-owner Kathy Brosh (center) shows off a silk wall hanging to a regular customer, while in the background University of Maryland students eat lunch.

As Kathy and Tal Brosch prepared to open the doors to the Berwyn Café one morning last month, they whipped up a few of their clientele’s favorite dishes, mixing and stirring and roasting their menu’s most popular meals. But unlike most restaurants, there were no burgers grilling to perfection, no cheeses spread across those burgers and certainly no French fries dumped in a vat of boiling grease.

Instead, as Kathy took phone calls from hungry customers, Tal put the finishing touches on Berwyn Café’s falafels, the ingredients for the Veggiewich and his specialty: the tofu gyro platter, which simmered under a slow roast just like its meat product counterpart.

‘‘It’s not hard to eat good food without having to kill something,” said Kathy, who has owned Berwyn Café with her husband since 2001. ‘‘Not only do we provide great tasting food without cholesterol, trans fat or artificial anything, but we respect all living things.”

Unlike most meat-lovers – who can’t imagine life without a juicy bacon cheeseburger or a hot dog smothered in all the fixings – Tal and Kathy have never missed the meat-eating lifestyle. Asked is she is a vegan — a person who abstains from ingesting or using animal products — Kathy nods yes with a smile before pausing. ‘‘Actually,” she said with a guilty shrug, ‘‘I drink a little cow milk.”

Tal, always dreaming up new ways to incorporate new flavors into tofu – a vegan staple – said he has been amused by the reactions of people who eat meat and drink milk on a daily basis.

‘‘We’re on a mission to make better food,” said Tal, who came to America from Israel in 1989, said as he prepared the humus. ‘‘Some people hear there is no meat and they get nervous. Buy hey, good food is good food. ... We don’t need to spill blood to satisfy our hunger.”

Berwyn Café, with its array of ‘‘cruelty-free food,” as Kathy said, also employs environmentally recycling policies – policies the café was recognized for by the College Park City Council last month. Kathy said the restaurant saves everything: left over rice to give to friends’ pooches, vegetable remains to be shipped to the compost, even soybean oil for a man who runs his pickup truck on the leftovers. Kathy even collects rainwater for her beloved plants.

Advocating her unique lifestyle can be difficult, she said, but introducing people to organic food and resource conservation has always been important to her and her husband.

‘‘I don’t try to preach to people about being [environmentally friendly], but I think it’s important to be a friend of the earth,” Kathy said. Sticking to a vegan or vegetarian diet, she said, ‘‘can make a person feel good about feeding yourself clean food and knowing that no blood was shed to have a good meal.”

And it’s not only vegans who frequent Berwyn Café. Susan Huber, a College Park resident who eats at the café once a week, said the menu can make a meat-eater reluctant, but having a healthy alternative to fast food is a much-needed change of pace.

‘‘It’s definitely different,” Huber said as she picked up her weekly tofu fix. ‘‘It took a few times to get used to it, but they have introduced me to foods I thought I’d never eat.”

E-mail Dennis Carter at dcarter@gazette.net.

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