Native Foods. - Palm Springs, California - restaurant reviews

A GOOD VEGETARIAN restaurant is about as rare as the fabled Jackelope in Palm Springs, a desert community that evokes scenes of tanned retirees sipping martinis and teeing off before settling in for massive meat-based meals.

Not fair, says Tanya Petrovna, the chef and owner of Native Foods. She says Palm Springs is also a haven for alternative-minded vegetarians, who flock to her restaurant from miles around. And thanks to glowing reviews in the local papers, the 1-year-old restaurant is also attracting people who rarely skip a steak supper.

One reason for Native Food's broad appeal is Petrovna's eclectic influences. She is of Czechoslovakian and Russian descent, and spent years in Japan, Thailand and Indonesia, She also makes her own tempeh, seitan and textured vegetable protein--a laborious but rewarding effort that has some suspicious eaters rethinking their distaste for meat analogues. "Our [seitan and tempeh] is so sweet and luscious, if I run out. we don't buy it," she says. The result is truly homestyle vegetarian cooking with an international flair.

Petrovna uses imaginative spices and fresh meat analogs to cobble together everything from simple sandwiches to main-dish feasts. Popular items include the Jerk Burger, a spicy grilled seitan steak marinated in Jamaican spices; the Warm and Wild salad with mushrooms and greens; the Yakisoba, a Japanese noodle stir fry with buckwheat noodles; and the Moby Dick, a flash fried seitan 'fish' sandwich.

Open since last May, Native Foods is already so popular that Petrovna is scouting for a second location. The room is small and colorful, and the food is served picnic style (off paper plates). An outdoor patio creates a "jungle in the desert" for diners. "We're the new wave of vegetarian cooking," Petrovna says. "We believe in world peace through the power of the fork."