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In the '60s and '70s, vegetarian food was as funky as a thrift store sweater: tangy with miso, scratchy from big clumps of alfalfa sprouts, beery with nutritional yeast. It was food you wore like a cultural statement, a badge declaring your allegiance to saving the planet, the perfect accessory for a new world order. Rejecting the unconscious oppression implicit in your mom's Swiss steak was the ultimate political act.

In 1979, when San Francisco Zen Center launched Greens restaurant in a converted military warehouse at Fort Mason, chef Deborah Madison shredded vegetarian food's kombu curtain. Inspired by a stint at Chez Panisse (and the exquisite produce of Zen Center's farm in West Marin), Madison had a revolutionary idea: Vegetarian food should be great food in its own right, not health food you endured because it was the right thing for the planet. In place of clunky college co-op cooking, Madison's vision was all about sophistication, minus the meat. Unctuous with butter, olive oil, cheese and creme fraiche, the cooking at Greens in the 1980s wasn't good for you -- it didn't pretend to be -- but it sure tasted great.

And though in the late 1990s San Francisco's Millennium upped the ante by doing vegan, eschewing the butterfat that lubricated Greens' repertoire, it nevertheless imitated it in a menu of complex, self-consciously "gourmet" dishes.

If you want to taste what vegetarian food has become in the new millennium, check out brand-new Cafe Gratitude in Berkeley. The food goes one step beyond vegan -- it's "live," meaning, for the most part, raw.

Raw-food advocates claim that foods that are heated above 120 degrees or so lose most of their nutrients, not to mention the enzymes that help your body digest them. But before the word "raw" triggers a flashback to the fibrous broccoli and miso-hummus dips of English department potlucks, stop. Cafe Gratitude has a menu of dishes as complicated and labor-intensive as anything ever envisioned at Greens, in surroundings as crammed with mismatched library tables and funky artwork as the student union at any liberal arts college. This is artifice served up with a big dose of funk.

When Matthew and Terces Engelhart opened the first Cafe Gratitude in San Francisco two years ago, it wasn't the Bay Area's first raw-foods restaurant. That same year, Roxanne's -- a restaurant in Larkspur that pioneered the concept of raw foods as fine dining -- closed its doors. Now, with a second restaurant in the city and a new one on Berkeley's Shattuck Avenue on the fringe of the gourmet ghetto, the Engelharts are the undisputed raw-foods gurus of the Bay Area.

On any given night, it feels like most of Berkeley is showing up to pay tribute. Dust off your best-loved Berkeley stereotype: You'll probably see it here. At night, the windowless brick space (it used to house Fontina) is dark except for the glare of track lighting on eyebrow rings, Aveda-moistened complexions, shiny ikat fabrics and grizzled salt-and-pepper beards.

Everyone shares a table, so you get to overhear lots of conversations. It's also easy to ask your tablemates for recommendations -- a good approach, considering that the menu reads like a list of self-esteem affirmations. I Am Happy (hummus with crackers). I Am Magical (stuffed mushrooms). I Am Dazzling (Caesar salad). I Am Lusciously Awake (a mocha smoothie).

According to owner Matthew Engelhart, Cafe Gratitude's roots are in the realm of new age self-help. "The idea was to shift people's ideas from ones of scarcity," says Engelhart, "to one of living in the fullness of the present moment." It started with a board game (it's called "The Abounding River") the Engelharts designed. There's one at each table, in case you want to play, and blowups of some of the game cards line the walls.

The point is to get you to feel positive about your life -- great if you're into it, but if you're not, it can feel a bit invasive. And it's not just the menu names that communicate the same preachy vibe: The water bottles bear words such as "fun" and "alive." Even the plates ask you: "What are you grateful for?" It's a bit like being invited to dinner and then realizing you have to sit through a sermon before you get fed.

But the food, when it arrives, is delicious, and far more delicate than descriptions like "a buckwheat and sunflower seed crust" (that's for the pizzas) lead you to hope for.

That pizza -- I Am Passionate ($10) -- has an explosive flavor, thanks to the combination of basil, great-tasting little sliced tomatoes, a clump of micro-greens and so-called cashew ricotta. Made from cashew milk, lemon juice and Himalayan salt, Cafe Gratitude's loose vegan cheese is grainy, but not unpleasantly so. The Brazil nut parmesan sprinkled on top is nicely salty and nubbly, and that sturdy-sounding crust (baked at about 110 degrees for 24 hours) is light, crispy and delicious.

I Am Insightful ($7.50), described as samosas, are delicate ear-like turnovers. The wrappers are squares of soft, salty spinach leather filled with spoonfuls of almond-sesame pate. The "pate" is a kind of hummus, fluffy and tart with lemon juice. A brick-colored mint dipping sauce is unpleasantly sweet, and not particularly minty. I Am Giving ($9) is a salad that reminds you of the bad old days of health food: The big, loose pile of shredded kale and seaweed doesn't have as much soy-laced sesame-orange dressing as it needs to elevate it from a clump of mulch.

And although I Am Flourishing ($12), the so-called Mediterranean plate, is intermittently clunky (crumbly walnut-almond "falafels" and "tzatziki" sauce that's nothing more than a heap of shredded cucumber topped with cashew-milk sour cream), working your way through the plate is an exercise in discovery, pleasant or not.

Given that two people can drop the better part of a hundred dollars for a meal of greens, grains and nut milks, a dinner at Cafe Gratitude makes its own cultural statement.

Reach East Bay food writer John Birdsall at jwbirdsall@sbcglobal.net.