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LIVE ORGANIC FOOD BAR

64 Dupont St., Toronto. 416-515-2002. Dinner for two with wine, tax and tip, $80.

Eating at Live Organic Food Bar would have been a terrible shock, except that I had just come back from a holiday in the American Southwest. Both vegan and raw food have been around for a while, but I have been fighting both tooth and nail. As an unrepentant Francophile, I say: Why would the goddess have given us stoves (and copper pots and cast-iron skillets) if she didn't want us to cook our food?

Los Angeles, in particular, prepared me for my vegan/raw food experience in Toronto. You might even call it training. Three things captured my attention in L.A.: big breasts, big bling and tofu-mania. Example: On Sunday, we lined up for half an hour to brunch in a restaurant where they didn't even have eggs Benny! Or anything else high-fat and fun. Most of the menu was healthy; people were chowing down on salads and other pure stuff, and I was converted by the improbably named Balance Bowl: tofu, organic brown rice and scrambled egg whites in cumin-spiked tomato sauce with a little guacamole on top.

The weird thing is they have figured out how to make it taste good, and I would happily eat it often. Fads hit California first, but tempting caricatures aside, how could it hurt us to eat healthier? Which is what propelled me to Live Organic Food Bar at Dupont and Spadina.

This place is about as granola as it gets. There are bicycles locked outside, and we are greeted at the door by very friendly, wholesome young women not wearing tight, black cleavage-baring clothing. Earnestness lives here. On the moss-green wall is a row of ersatz oversized apples, and under them are words of inspiration: balance, nature, spirit, breathe, love. There are moss-green vinyl banquettes (no animal was slain for these) and recycled green linoleum. Even the clock is green. The napkins are made from recycled brown paper, and chairs and tables are orange metal stamped with vaguely botanical cut-out shapes.

But pardon my snarky tone. Think of it as resistance, probably a necessary stepping stone on the therapeutic journey toward being a better person - a person who does not crave foie gras and frites and eggs Benedict in the a.m., a good person who likes vegetables and whole grains and juices with weird names. This is the person I will become if I eat often enough at Live.

The food is vegan, and most of it is raw. The menu says raw food "has not been heated above 115 F, therefore not destroying any enzymes which aid in digestion allowing for maximum nutrition." There are entire restaurants (in California, where else?) with raw menus. At some of these, I have been assured, they make puréed cashews taste like creamy cheese. Live does not do that. Their puréed cashews, which I meet atop pizza, taste like puréed cashews. The pizza crust is mashed-together grains that have been dried in a dehydrator, producing a hard but crunchy crust that bears no resemblance to regular pizza crust, but is not unpleasant. It's like a very thick cracker.

These same puréed cashews do a star turn in so-called mac 'n' cheese, which is strings of raw butternut-squash mixed with the cashew business. Here, in contrast with the assertive squash, the cashews taste less cashew-like and are more creamy. Mac 'n' cheese it ain't, but the dish has charm. The puréed cashews reappear in "cannelloni" with black olive relish and "roasted" red pepper purée. Many quotation marks are used to indicate that not much is what it's called. The cannelloni are thin zucchini "noodles" rolled round dill-infused cashew "cheese." It tastes like a creamy salad.

Live's mission is to serve mostly raw food. Try a raw "bacon-cheese" burger. Any resemblance to its namesake is nominal, but the crunchy walnut-sunflower patty topped with dried eggplant "bacon" and sun-dried-tomato "ketchup" is not unpleasant. The lettuce leaf "bun" is not funny. Less dissonant is the un-stir fry, wherein mixed veg, hemp seeds and crispy sprouted mung beans have enough almost-teriyaki sauce to make even their finely chopped parsnip "fried rice" taste good.

All of Live's cooked foods follow macrobiotic and Ayurvedic principles, which means it's local, it's healthy, there's neither dairy nor meat - basically grains and veg. Making a curried apple soup with no dairy isn't easy, and they do a heroic job of it. Ginger gives zing, but forget rich. They don't do rich.

But they do wine and beer (both organic) as well as cocktails made with organic-hemp vodka or sake mixed with various healing elixirs (bee pollen, ginkgo, aloe vera, assorted tinctures). Go wild.

The big surprise is the chocolate-avocado pie with coconut crust. We had held faint hope for dessert after the server told us they were all raw and made with neither flour nor refined sugar. How can you have any fun that way? But this chocolate thing is deep and dark and correctly bittersweet, and its coconut un-crust is passable.

The moral of the story: Eating healthy is not, in epicurean terms, going over to the dark side. It's not Béarnaise sauce on filet mignon, but life goes on with grains and veg. Maybe longer.

Last week's column on Paris bistros should have read that dinners at each of the eateries reviewed cost about $120 for two with wine.