From Seed to Plate

Lenny Martinelli is an affable, sunny guy with a smart head on his shoulders. He’s been buying and operating successful restaurants in Boulder County since the early 1990s. Today, he owns a catering company, four restaurants in Boulder—the Dushanbe Teahouse, Naropa Café, Ají Latin American Restaurant, and Leaf Vegetarian Restaurant—and one in Louisville, The Huckleberry.

But Leaf Vegetarian Restaurant, his newest, is the one he calls his baby. Fifteen years ago, when Martinelli bought the Naropa Café, a typical vegetarian entrée was “a stuffed potato and some roasted vegetables,” he says with a laugh, rolling his eyes. “I always wanted to open a gourmet restaurant whose menu felt like a regular fine-dining menu, but just happened to be vegetarian.”

Nature inspired Leaf’s soothing but eye-catching design: organic curves, flowing water, green plants and a sculptural tree.Inset: Spring Pea Ravioli with pea/mint foam.

That’s what he’s done at Leaf, where Spring Pea Ravioli ($16) combines English peas and sugar-snap peas, pea shoots, tomato, brown butter, and a pea-and-mint foam. A more typical entrée, and one of the most popular, is the Bi Bim Bop ($13)—teriyaki tofu, marinated cucumber and bean sprouts, jasmine rice, kimchi, soft-cooked egg and spinach. Another favorite is the Jamaican jerk tempeh ($15), which comes with Forbidden black rice, coconut-plantain sauce, sautéed greens, fruit salsa and plantain chips. Common menu items are elevated by flavors that pop, as in the banana curry ($14) with cauliflower, peas and potato, served with apple-and-raisin compote, naan and scallion rice.

At lunch, Leaf also offers sandwiches such as the seitan Reuben ($8)—layers of seitan, sauerkraut, Swiss cheese and Russian dressing on marble rye; and the roasted poblano sandwich ($9), with tomato, avocado, red onion, asadero cheese, vegan aioli and mustard on bolillo bread, a traditional Mexican bread bought from a local market. Both are served with served with soup, salad or fries. There are usually a couple of brunch items on the menu, too, such as the breakfast burrito ($9) or vegan French toast ($11).

As you might expect, Leaf does a mean salad, with the option to add tempeh or marinated tofu for an additional $2. Salads come in two sizes: the sprout salad, for example, costs $9 for a generous full size or $5 for a half portion. It has sunflower sprouts, pea shoots, butter lettuce, pumpkin and sunflower seeds, pickled red onion and sherry vinaigrette. The blackened tofu salad ($11 for a full size, $6 for a half size) has field greens, strawberry, red onion, cherry tomatoes, chèvre, blackened tofu, and caramelized shallot vinaigrette.

Owner Larry Martinelli always dreamed of "A gourmet retaurant that just happened to be vegetarian."

Small plates ($6-$7) such as smoked tofu crêpe and Buffalo seitan—a takeoff on Buffalo wings with blue cheese, carrot and celery salad—are offered all day. But prices go down to $4.50 from 3 to 6 p.m. every day, when Leaf hosts a “quintessentially Boulder” happy hour. Boulder’s own Vodka 14 organic Martinis are $5 each; try the Posmo—pomegranate-infused vodka, Cointreau and fresh lime juice—or the Jamaican Rose, hibiscus flower-infused vodka with agave nectar. Glasses of eco-friendly red and white house wines are $3.50 each, with additional wines at $7 to $8 per glass. At Leaf, all beers and wines are either organic, biodynamic, or produced using sustainable practices.

Dinnertime brings further specials. There’s a three-course prix-fixe menu for $26, and when you buy one dinner entrée, you can get a second one for half-price.

Sharing the Bounty

In warm weather, much of the produce served at Leaf comes from the 63rd Street Farm in east Boulder, which Martinelli helped build and develop. All the farm’s produce is grown organically and biodynamically. “We’re truly ‘from seed to plate,’” says Martinelli, who, with his partners, this year planted 3 acres with beets, peppers, herbs, winter squashes, tomatoes, greens, beans, peas, carrots, bok choy and pumpkins. They plan to plant 13 acres next year.

Owning several restaurants helps Martinelli economize in planning his produce, and in other ways. He recently promoted Steve Dustin, the executive chef at Ají next door, to be head chef at Leaf also. “Good vegetarian chefs are hard to find that really know their way around a commercial kitchen,” Martinelli says. “Now we have much better consistency, as well as another chef’s flair for vegetarian cuisine.”

Fruit flavors and local organic vodka star in Leaf’s Martinis.

An artist with a degree in architecture from CU-Boulder, Martinelli designed all of his restaurants’ kitchens and most of the dining rooms. At first, the space now occupied by Leaf was intended to be a special-events room, but the huge windows, the quality of the sunlight and the beauty of the space inspired him, instead, to finally create his dream vegetarian restaurant. The brick wall dictated a color palette of pale green, taupe and cream, and nature inspired the rest: organic curves, a modern metal sculpture of a tree, a waterfall, chic lighting.

Martinelli feels good about the future of Leaf and the restaurant industry in Boulder. “This recession has been a good, healthy wakeup call,” he says. “It made us trim the fat. I think we got a little spoiled.” Martinelli refocused on customer service and took a careful look at the prices on his menus, deciding that he’d “rather have more customers who each pay less than fewer customers and an expensive menu.” He cites the Dushanbe Teahouse as the perfect example. “I could have made a lot of money by charging a few dollars more per plate at the teahouse, but I didn’t want to. In Tajikistan, teahouses are community gathering places. That’s what our teahouse is, too. That’s what all of our restaurants are.”

Kuvy Ax has lived in Boulder most of her adult life, but grew up in England, which helps her appreciate Boulder’s restaurants all the more. She handles PR for several local food and beverage companies, including the Colorado Wine Industry Development Board.

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