Organic Quinoa Rice Pilaf. Recipe on next page.
Healthy Eating Made Easy at Café Evergreen
By Rick Dakan
106 SARASOTA SCENE | JANUARY 2018
on the town
not stored.” The restaurant doesn’t even have a fryer, because
they don’t want the smell of oil in the restaurant and can
cook healthier without it. For example, baking their sweet
approach. “It has to taste great or I’m not going to put it on
our menu,” Ted repeats over and over again, and it does.
One of the most popular dishes is the avocado sliders. Served
on bread made in the café from dehydrated onions, these
delicious, aromatic starters are seasoned with micro greens
uses kelp noodles, which are gluten free, healthy as heck, and
veggies, and proteins they’re served with. The Roasted Beet
Reuben has roast beets instead of corned beef, homemade
sauerkraut and vegan 1000 Island dressing. But it’s not all
veggie and vegan, there’s also a version with Ted’s own baked
Café Evergreen puts just as much care and thought into its
a probiotic drink that promotes a healthy gut and better
digestion, is made from water instead of dairy. Ted has kept
“You can eat as much as you want and lose weight and feel
great.” Oh, I wish that were true! It’s a new year, and a new
round of resolutions. Live healthier. Feel better. Easier said
than done, especially in the face of all the delicious salt, fat,
and sugar-soaked temptations that lurk in every cupboard,
grocery aisle, and restaurant menu. But Ted Weinberger’s got
some great advice. “When you eat clean, fresh food, you can
eat as much as you want and lose weight and feel great. It’s
not true that healthy food doesn’t taste good.” And he’s right,
especially if you eat at Ted Weinberger and Annette Schmitt’s
Café Evergreen in Nokomis.
For eight years, this casual, health-conscious eatery has worked
tirelessly to spread the good word about eating your way to
served customers at the Warm Mineral Springs in North Port.
Then it moved and expanded into its current locale, a quaint
building that dates back to 1923, added dinner service and
breakfast on weekends, and has been serving bigger and bigger
crowds every year since.
Their regulars include “lots of doctors and health care workers,”
according to Ted. “People who know that what you put in your
body really affects you.”
Café Evergreen works hard to make everything they serve
affects diners for the better. “Everything’s made from scratch,
no preservatives, less salt,” explains Ted. “It’s meant to be eaten,