Restaurant serves only food available to cavemen

There’s no cheese, no bread, no sugar served at Berlin’s Sauvage Restaurant.

You see, the trendy eatery only caters to cavemen. According to its chalkboard menu, “Real Food Revolution: Peolithic cuisine!”

What that means is that it only serves what Fred Flinstone would have eaten two million years ago. Pterodactyl drumsticks? No, writes Alison Killian in the German magazine Der Spiegel:

Diners eat at candle-lit tables with a contemporary cave painting hanging in the background. 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.

So, the restaurant isn’t just trying a gimmick — but is catering to a fad. “Guests at Sauvage can try ‘Paleo,’” writes Killian, “without feeling obligated to take on a strictly Stone Age lifestyle.”

“Many people think the Paleolithic diet is just some hipster trend but it’s a worldwide phenomenon, with an online community that spans the globe,” Sauvage’s Boris Leite-Poço told Der Spiegel. “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.”

Killian continues:

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.

Asked about menu items — such as wine — that would have been unlikely in a Paleolithic person’s diet, Leite-Poço acknowledges that Sauvage makes some exceptions. “The restaurant has to survive and we have to find an audience among the majority of people, who are not Paleo. So we do make some concessions,” he explains. The stricter strain of Paleo emphasizing the consumption of raw meat, for instance, is tough to implement at a restaurant that wants to keep its license.

While the ingredients on the menu at Sauvage might point to the restaurant’s Stone Age roots, the Paleolithic 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.”