Ep. 87: A Balanced Diet with Spike Mendelsohn- Chef, Restaurateur, and Cookbook Author

Chef Spike Mendelsohn is an internationally acclaimed chef, author, food policy advocate and restauranteur, including Good Stuff Eatery and his most recent venture, PLNT Burger. Spike has competed on numerous television cooking shows, including Top Chef and Iron Chef America. Spike is also very active in the D.C. community, serving as Chair of the Washington, D.C. "D.C. Food Policy Council" under Mayor Bowser. Spike also recently announced he is partnering with Van Metre to build and design homes throughout the DMV. Through PLNT Burger and his other ventures, Spike and his partners seek to “be the brand that allows you to have a little bit more diversity in your diet and not sacrifice deliciousness for the eating habits that you so much love.”

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Show Notes

[1:30] It also takes a lot of really great partners and support from family, friends and my wife and kid. And they're the ones that really allow me the freedom to be so creative and to take on so much. So without that type of support, I really wouldn't be anything.
[2:00] You know, there'll be some missteps along the way, but those are all just valuable lessons that leads you to the next place.
[3:16] And that's kind of what drives my passion for food and everything else I identify.
[5:14] I was kind of a little bit of a lost soul. I didn't know what direction I wanted to go in life, really.
[5:56] People from all around the world are attending the school to learn these things, and I just jumped into it.
[6:23] And I wasn't taking it too seriously because I was on this trajectory of three Michelin stars. I'm not going to go waste my career on TV.
[7:05] I never got the win, but I feel like I'm winning in life.
[7:19] But it really set the course for a successful career for me, maybe not the path I had really planned on, which was Michelin and all this kind of stuff, but a path that was really complemented with the type of person I am in character where I like to show face, I like to have I like to be silly. I like to cook good food. I like to travel.
[8:49] It's the combination of so much experience on trial and error with some of my other concepts, and some of my other brands, that I've been able to really bring this together and package it really well.
[9:19] What we're trying to do is we're trying to democratize plant based food. We're trying to give healthier options for people that are still very indulgent, not sacrificing the flavor or the deliciousness of the food or even really the eating habits that we all have. And what I mean by that is we're just a delicious burger joint.
[9:53] We've been able to really leverage the idea of climate change and the effects that it's having on our planet. And being that we're a one hundred percent vegan restaurant, our food system really contributes to a lot of the climate change crisis that we have and the production of those big industries, so if we're able to change that through serving you something delicious, I think that the win win for us.
[10:27] To develop an animal protein burger compared to a plant burger, we use 98 percent less water. We use 97 percent less land. There's all these metrics that we can measure it to that really lessen the environmental footprint.
[11:47] But with the flavors and with the ingredients that we've managed to be able to use, you can't tell the difference.
[12:32] this. If you asked me five years ago if these are some of the things I would have in my repertoire and I would talk about, I say never, never. But that's the beauty of the plant based movement right now. The ingredients available to chefs to use and practice with and get creative with is unmanageable.
[12:56] Imagine being a painter your whole life and painting off of one color palette your entire life, and then all of a sudden someone comes in and, like, swapped your color palette. And there's all these new colors that you've never worked with before your entire life. It would be pretty exciting, right? That's kind of the moment that I've been having the last couple years, that I'm using things that I never thought I would use.
[13:25] Too often the plant based movement is positioned for the elite because it's expensive and maybe there's not too much education on how to cook it or what to pair it up with.
[13:41] We want it to give you energy. We don't want it to sit there and make you feel heavy. And we want it to be delicious.
[17:39] So the plans for PLNT burger are big. They're very aspirational. We realize to own up to our mission democratizing plant based foods and saving the planet, we have to make a big splash, national and international.
[18:39] I was hearing about health care workers really not getting time for lunch or working all such crazy hours. And I said, we have to do something. We have to give back.
[18:54] The idea was that people could place an order and when they do that, we donate the same meal to a health care worker.
[19:13] They're at the frontlines of this, they're risking their lives and their well-being, and it's the least that we could do as a company to kind of give back and feed people.
[19:36] I've been a little bit of a preacher of everything in moderation when it comes to your diet and your food.
[19:47] I think we're all very unique and we have to listen to our bodies and know what works with our own body. We can't just put ourselves in this bucket and pretend that we can eat our act and exercise just like everybody else. We really have to do some self investigating, what I call, and really know what works for our diet and what doesn't.
[20:33] We're trying to be the brand that allows you to have a little bit more diversity in your diet and not sacrifice deliciousness for the eating habits that you so much love.

Thank you for joining us on Health Gig. We loved having you with us. We hope you'll tune in again next week. In the meantime, be sure to like and subscribe to this podcast, and follow us on healthgigpod.com.

“There'll be some missteps along the way, but those are all just valuable lessons that leads you to the next place.”- Spike Mendelsohn
“What we're trying to do is we're trying to democratize plant based food. We're trying to give healthier options for people that are still very indulgent, not sacrificing the flavor or the deliciousness of the food or even really the eating habits that we all have.” - Spike Mendelsohn
“We're all very unique and we have to listen to our bodies and know what works with our own body. We can't just put ourselves in this bucket and pretend that we can eat our act and exercise just like everybody else. We really have to do some self investigating, and really know what works for our diet and what doesn't.” - Spike Mendelsohn

Keywords

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