Description
At Au NatuRaw in Santa Ana, a raw-food vegan eatery, you won’t miss meat here for the same reason you wouldn’t yearn for Disneyland while hiking through the Sierras--there’s a lot to keep you preoccupied and distracted. The best dish is the pad Thai, a concoction that doesn’t taste like pad Thai, yet manages to transcend that fact. It features noodles made by kelp--thin, angel-hair-like strands exhibiting so much of the translucence, resiliency and elasticity of the real thing it’s rather uncanny. It even twirls on a fork the right way. Only when you bite do you notice that the consistency is slightly crunchier, more wiggly and jelly-like than noodles made from starch. The best thing about the dish is halfway into it, you forget you aren’t eating noodles.
