Welcome to Rams Eat, VCUCard’s web series
where we take you behind the scenes of VCU’s
favorite eating spots that accept your RamBucks
to get the story behind the restaurants.
In this episode we are at Root Natural Kitchen
to meet with the co-owner, Alvero to take
us behind the scenes on how they make their
all natural bowls.
Thank you so much for having us!
I am Ian.
Yeah thanks for having me
What is your name?
I am Alvero
Alvero, very good to meet you.
Thank you for having us in this a beautiful
place.
Talk to us about this building.
So, we love the richmond market, we were thinking
about coming here walking up and down the
street and saw this kind of little run down
at the time but this beautiful, historic building
and it was completely vacant and my business
partner saw it and fell in love with it and
he called me.
He sent photos and he loved the building and
we were fortunate enough to be selected to
come here and start building a restaurant.
Wonderful!
Great!
Talk to us about the history of Roots Natural
Kitchen.
Sure, Well I went to the school at UVA, graduated
2015 and my business partner also went to
school there and graduated 2013 and it is
really difficult as a students to be healthy.
There really weren’t any good food options.
There wasn’t even that you know unhealthy
food, there wasn’t any tasty options there
in the first place.
So for us starters and thinking about calling
it roots was just an opportunity and we knew
that something that sold salads it is going
to be successful and the reason it was such
a powerful thing for us was because when you
eat in such way, we had more energy, we were
sleeping better, felt better and we were in
a better mood.
So when we talked about it we were like this
is really powerful.
Right so it is not about living instead of
told 90-95 or you not getting arthritis when
you are 80 or having a 6-pack.
It is about feeling better then at that moment
right and feeling better in 5 hours.
No matter really what you do in life, you
can get behind having more energy or sleeping
better.
Absolutely!
So for us, we really wanted to build a concept
that made it easier for people to do that.
We sounded a little obvious but it had to
taste really good.
Since food is a really important part of our
lives we do it 3 times a day, celebrate holidays
and birthdays around it.
So we really wanted to build a product that
people weren't coming because it was healthy
but because the food was awesome.
Second two things that was important to us
were affordability, like organic quinoa with
shredded rainbow radishes would be 28 dollars.
So for us it was important to be in that 8
to 9 dollar price range.
The third thing was that traditionally healthy
food was associated with you going to eat
spinach, red onions and tomatoes and you would
be hungry in 7 minutes.
So for us, actual food span is a wide range
of things, we have whole grains, thick cut
soup potatoes with different beans with grilled
chicken breast.
So you could be a 5 foot guy that weighs 100
pounds or you can be 6 foot 6 guy that deadlifts
350 pounds and they can both leave satisfied
from here.
I know it was a little bit of a rant but I
think these things were important
No we appreciate you talking with us.
Thank you!
