Editor’s note: This story was updated for clarity at 7:30 a.m. on Dec. 15.

Karyn’s Kitchen, a vegan restaurant that specializes in raw food, opened in Flossmoor Commons on Dec. 1. It’s next door to Karyn’s Inner Beauty, a spa and wellness shop owned by the same lifestyle guru, wellness author and entrepreneur Karyn Calabrese.

The menu includes rice, green beans, corn bread, chocolate brownies, chicken sandwiches, burgers and rib tips. 

All food at Karyn’s Kitchen is vegan. Calabrese said she makes foods that are comforting to people, but she makes them plant based. 

In addition to being a restaurant, Calabrese said she’ll be teaching classes at Karyn’s Kitchen including food prep classes, cooking classes, detox classes, a class on how to go vegan for nine days and others, she said.

“The restaurant’s closed on Mondays. So, this whole section here will be a classroom,” Calabrese said.

Calabrese said she’s eaten raw food for 40 years. She said before she was a raw foodist, she was a vegan and before that, she was a meat eater. 

Calabrese said the meat industry is “killing the world” and that television “programs you in how to think.” She said she helps people “find a different truth” and “get back to their roots” at Karyn’s Kitchen. 

“Raw food is ultimately the way we’re all intended to eat. Humans are the only animals that voluntarily cook their food. No other animal cooks their food except our pets that we feed – and they get the exact same diseases we do,” Calabrese said. 

“Cheese is even worse to eat than meat,” Calabrese said. “It’s a substance created for another animal that’s supposed to grow a thousand pounds in the first year of its life.”

According to Oklahoma State University, calves are about 500 pounds at birth and grow to a thousand pounds in 367 days.

“It’s not a natural human instinct to eat dead flesh. We’ve only learned to do that. If you were on a desert island and you hadn’t eaten in a month and … a dead cow appears and a bushel of apples. Where do you think your instincts will take you?” Calabrese said.

Inside Karyn’s Kitchen, newspaper clippings are displayed, regarding the restaurants she’s owned and operated in Chicago for the last four decades. Calabrese said she owned and operated the second raw food restaurant in the country. When she started out, there was only one other vegan restaurant in Chicago, she said.

“I moved out here and that’s why I decided to open up out here,” Calabrese said, regarding why she opened Karyn’s Kitchen in Flossmoor. None of her Chicago restaurants are open now. She said “the city presented a lot of problems” such as rising rents and store space being replaced with condos.

Karyn’s Kitchen has both a raw and cooked food menu. Calabrese said all cooked food items on the menu can also come in raw. This includes raw  and cooked plant-based burgers, raw and cooked lasagna. Calabrese said the ingredients are often different when going from cooked to raw.

“I got to stay open and most of the world isn’t looking for raw,” Calabrese said, regarding why cooked food is included on the menu. “People aren’t going to go from a McDonald’s burger to a raw burger, but they will go from a McDonald’s burger to cooked, plant-based burger. You have to give people bridges.”