Berlin Restaurant Serves Stone Age Food

A new restaurant has recently opened up at Berlin. You won’t find cheese, bread or sugar here. Instead, guests at the Sauvage restaurant are served dishes made only of ingredients that would have been available to hunter-gatherer of the Paleolithic age, also known as the Stone Age.

The menu includes salads with olives, capers and pine nuts; gluten-free bread with nut-based butter or olive tapenades; smoked salmon with herb dressing; and other various meat and fish dishes. Gluten- and sugar-free cakes, like a spicy pumpkin pie, are available for those Stone Age diners who refuse to forego desert. A focus on transparency is also important to the owners: Sauvage's guests know exactly what ingredients they are eating in every dish.

Sauvage, which is also the French word for "savage" or "wild," is part of the Paleolithic diet movement, whereby adherents eat only foodstuffs that would have been available to Stone Age humans. This means organic, unprocessed fruit and vegetables, meat, fish, eggs, nuts, seeds, and herbs. The truly obsessed build an entire lifestyle around the concept, mimicking caveman-era exercise -- lifting boulders and running barefoot, with some even emulating the blood loss they believe Stone Age hunters might have experienced in pursuit of their dinner by donating blood every few months.

Paleolithic diet is recent phenomenon. "Right now the trend is probably strongest in the United States, where people who have had enough of the fast food way of life and generations of illness have taken it up," explains Leite-Poço, co-owner of Sauvage.

Despite Sauvage’s Stone Age roots, the restaurateurs do allow themselves to make use of certain modern conveniences when preparing the food. "Of course we don't cook over an open fire," admits Leite-Poço. "And we try to avoid using it -- but we do have a microwave in the kitchen."

[via Spiegel]