Huntington Beach's Bodhi Tree Cafe does a body good

After reading an article in this month's National Geographic about the Sierra Nevada Indians of Columbia, I was ready to eat vegetarian food. The Sierra Nevada Indians are struggling against a militant encroachment of coca farmers and the right-wing paramilitaries that accompany the cocaine trade of Colombia — almost half a world away from Huntington Beach.

Nonetheless, I was inspired to eat a meal with the least amount of damage done to the planet as possible.

That's why I became excited when I entered the Bodhi Tree Cafe on Main Street in HB and saw a waiter sporting a T-shirt with a pig that read: "Don't eat me — I love you." I felt my karma increasing every moment!

Bodhi Tree Cafe is not the best vegetarian food I've eaten'— but it can hang in the top five. I reserve the number one title for Happy Family Restaurant in Monterey Park. It's a megalithic two-story Chinese restaurant, vegetarian on top, meat eaters on the bottom. An ex-girlfriend's mom once told me that the vegetarian level was on the second story because vegetarians are closer to heaven.

Word to the Buddha — back at the Bodhi Tree Cafe, I was stoked by the $5.95 lunch special. I even ate it outside on the patio. Not really closer to heaven, I guess, but defiantly closer to exhaust from the cars on Main Street. It was like an omen from the bodhisattvas when an EV Rav-4 parked near my table just before the waiter brought me an Avocado Boba.

Bodhi Tree Cafe is one of the few restaurants where you can order organic brown rice with your food. Brown rice was once an important staple of China and Japan. That was before we began to bleach it, a process that strips almost all the nourishing minerals and vitamins from the grains and leaves them white. In other words — brown rice equals super nourishment when it's cooked well.

Bodhi Tree Cafe makes their rice pretty good, again, it's not Happy Family, but it does the job. Their menu needs redesign, some places of it reminded me of those colorblind spot tests. Text printed on pictures make it a bit hard to read – but manages to give it a Los Angeles Thai-Town feel. A closer look reveals over 100 meat dishes that aren't exactly meat. Things like Sweet and Sour Shrimp and Beef Noodle Pho are suggesting more than what's really there. A deep inspection reveals no embedded negative karma. The meat is actually a wheat-gluten bean curd concoction that has a chicken-like texture, without all the growth hormones and cage-burn. It's a versatile substitute, and it can become almost any animal — duck, bird, cow, pig, fish, lamb, etc.

The good thing about the fake meat is that it soaks up the sauce. The sauces are everything at Bodhi Tree Cafe, or any restaurant frankly. It seems that the kitchen staff at Bodhi Tree Cafe has mastered their sauce-making like monks saving jing, as a result, the wheat-gluten usually soaks up the goodness better than most meats could. Boddhi Tree is a classic family operation. On a trip to the bathroom, I propped my head in the kitchen and spotted Grandma behind the wok frying tofu. "Word to your Buddha!" I thought, "This spot is legit."

The best way to try Bodhi Tree Cafe is to go in group, that way you can order a bunch of different dishes and try them all. Save room for the Vegan Ice Cream too, it's not bad.

The Bodhi Tree Cafe — 501 Main St., Suite E, Huntington Beach, 92648. (714)969-9500. Open Online 11 a.m. — 10 p.m. No alcohol. Dinner for four $30-$50.

Sean Orfila is a senior journalism student at CSULB. If you know of a good restaurant in Long Beach, especially one that is family-owned, e-mail him at freshbeets@ gmail.com.