Going for the green

<p>Peter Lowell's, the new organic restaurant in Sebastopol, is about as green as green gets these days, short of a trip to the Emerald City.</p><p>For one thing, it's the first restaurant in Sonoma County housed in a LEED-certified building. LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design and is a green building rating system developed by the U.S. Green Building Council.</p><p>It's heartening to see that while a lot of hand-wringing is going on over global warming, some practical people are actually doing something about it.</p><p>One of those people is Steven Sheldon, a Sebastopol architect who has designed the Florence Lofts -- a complex of living spaces, work lofts and, since October, a restaurant co-owned by his son, Lowell Peter Sheldon (hence the restaurant's name) and Lowell's business partner and chef, Steven Peyer.</p><p>These folks are serious about going green. The cluster of buildings brings together solar-powered electricity, lots of glass to allow sunlight in to heat the concrete floors, and gray-water collectors used to irrigate the water-wise landscaping.</p><p>In the restaurant itself, the countertops are made of recycled paper and resins, tables and chairs are made of recycled or sustainably farmed wood, and solar panels power low-energy fluorescent lighting.</p><p>All packaging for to-go items is made from recycled paper and is compostable. Cooking oil goes into biodiesel vehicles, and all vegetable waste and coffee grounds from the kitchen are composted. Table water is local and filtered, not bottled.</p><p>All the ingredients are as fresh and local as possible, organic when available, or sustainably farmed. Seafood is served, but no meat, which the owners believe takes too much energy and land to raise and contributes to groundwater pollution and greenhouse gases. Sounds like the eco-commandos have landed in Sebastopol -- but then, weren't they always there? They just didn't have a restaurant of their own.</p><p>Now they do. On a recent Thursday night, the 33-seat restaurant was standing-room only and there was a 45-minute wait to be served. The next night, things were calmer at 5 p.m., but the place soon began to fill up.</p><p>The food here is inexpensive and aimed squarely at the vegan-vegetarian-organic crowd. And this being Sonoma County, there's a wine bar. A list of 20 organic, sustainable or biodynamic wines are all sold by the glass. Iron Horse's Wedding Cuvée is the bubbly at $9. Lowell's list includes the 2005 Purisima Mountain Sauvignon Blanc from Santa Ynez Valley's Beckmen Vineyards for $7. There's a nice 2004 Bucklin Zin for $7, and the most expensive glass is $14 for the 2005 Whetstone Pleasant Hill Vineyard Pinot Noir.</p><p>Clothing designers could spend a profitable evening sketching the young people who frequent Lowell's. They have a knack for wearing ordinary items of clothing in extraordinary ways. It remains true that tomorrow's fashion trends are set by today's high school kids with access to good thrift shops and plenty of their own creativity.</p><p>Waldorf-school style art decorates the walls. Tea lights in glass holders add splashes of primary colors around the earth-toned room. On a recent night, The Cure was playing on the sound system, but as the dinner hour approached, the "kings of mope" were replaced by quieter musical fare.</p><p>The full menu is chalked on boards fixed to the wall above the open kitchen. Lowell's serves breakfast, lunch and dinner. The breakfast items and deli sandwiches disappear by dinnertime. The core of the menu is its greens, soups and pizzas. You can order greens for $5 an individual portion or $9 for enough for your family. Soups are $4 a cup and $6 a bowl. Pizzas are all one medium size for $13.</p><p>So how's the food?</p><p>If you like this kind of food, you'll like Lowell's. If you're a meat-and-potatoes person, maybe not so much. But the chef does a fine job with what he's trying to do. And what he's trying to do is healthy food, a balance of good fats, lots of veggies, and even a nod in the direction of macrobiotic food.</p><p>For instance, the Marinated Tofu Macro Bowl ($1.50 **½) might not be the most delicious thing you'll ever put in your mouth, but your body will appreciate the thin strips of tofu, the brown rice, the bits of rapini, seeds and beans, and two sauces to bring it all together -- one a ginger-miso sauce, the other sesame-lemon. It would make a filling lunch, and for goodness sake, it's only a buck and a half.</p><p>The seasonal soup of the day was Azuki Bean Soup ($4 **½), with the bean that is often spelled "adzuki." The soup was satisfying, with a slight spiciness in its rich, red base. The azuki bean is usually a red bean, which is the case here. Bits of carrots added to the sweet, lush flavor. In Asia, the azuki beans are often cooked with sugar, and this soup was sweet enough to qualify as authentically Asian in style. It was finished with a swirl of crème fraiche.</p><p>Rapini ($5 **½) is also known as broccoli raab, and is a nutritious, often bitter version of broccoli with long stems, leaves and small clusters of green, unopened flower buds. Here a big bunch of it is braised, then chopped into small pieces and laced with whole cloves of garlic, chiles, anchovies and organic extra virgin olive oil. Little fried crunchies and shredded cheese topped the big plate of greens.</p><p>The Gemischte Salat ($5*** )-- German for "mixed salad" -- is a very pretty salad with a mixture of red lettuces, red radicchio, slices of white radishes, julienned watermelon radishes and seaweed, given a puckery cilantro vinaigrette. If you are a salad lover, Lowell's will be an oasis of greenery for you.</p><p>You have a choice of four types of pizza, cooked in the gas-fired pizza oven. The Cipolla features red onion and Reggiano-Parmigiano cheese, arugula, and for an extra buck, an organic egg -- though why you'd want to put an egg on top is beyond me. The Pizza Raj sounds like it might feature Indian spices, but it is a marinara base topped with caramelized leeks and local chevre. The Pizza Noah is a white pizza with rapini, tempeh (mold-infused soybeans), beans and rosemary with fontina cheese. I opted for the Giardino Pizza ($13 ), with its house-made thin crust topped with a marinara sauce, red onions, gypsy peppers (sweet, like bell peppers), shreds of basil, and mozzarella cheese so stringy when hot you should bring scissors to cut the strings. It was delicious.</p><p>The special of the night, Pappardelle with Clams ($13 ***) was also delicious. About a dozen manila clams had been cooked along with an equal number of whole roasted garlic cloves, then set atop a mound of wide pappardelle noodles, all of which sat in a rich tomato broth.</p><p>But of all the dishes, a Roasted Beet and Blue Cheese Risotto ($8 ***) really stood out. The perfectly cooked rice was red from the beets and savory from the blue cheese, and it was given a swirl of olive oil.</p><p>For dessert, there's Chocolate Truffle Cake ($6*** ) that's as airy as chocolate mousse, covered with cocoa crunchies, and given a malted milk and chocolate sauce.</p><p>To sum up: Sebastopol gets the restaurant it's been destined to have for years: healthy, veggie and delicious.</p><p>Jeff Cox writes a weekly restaurant review column for A&amp;E. You can reach him at jeffcox@sonic.net.</p>