WALNUT CREEK, CALIFORNIA – I wanted to try Sipeos in Walnut Creek’s Broadway Plaza since it opened about two years ago.
But mild interest turned into something a bit more urgent when a vegetarian friend told me that this is the best vegetarian restaurant in the East Bay.
My wife and I stopped by on Friday night to try Sipeos out. We discovered a creative, delicious restaurant that thrives on constraints.
And we also learned that Sipeos has a top-secret menu—and everything on it is delicious!
Don’t worry, we got permission to share the secret words that cause this menu to appear, so you can summon it too. Read on for more.
A Prominent Spot
Sipeos is both quite prominent and in a location that’s a bit tucked away.
The restaurant is located in the former Cocola Bakery spot between Macy’s and True Food Kitchen.
Owner Hetal Shah told me that being near True Food is helpful because that flagship Broadway Plaza restaurant already attracts the kind of diners that Sipeos wants to reach.
The foot traffic during busy seasons in Broadway Plaza is also great.
The flip side to that is that things can slow down dramatically when people aren’t there shopping. Particularly in the evenings, when the stores start to close, it becomes a bit trickier location to have a restaurant.
Despite that, Sipeos has been making it work for two years. The restaurant has a lovely interior space with a prominent bar and a nice light wood aesthetic.
On a nicer day, there’s also a lovely outdoor patio where you can sit and have your meal.
Thriving on Constraints
There’s an old adage in the art world that a frame is what makes the painting.
The constraints of a frame force creativity. The artist only has a small space in which to realize their vision, and the trade-offs inherent in that are what create great art.
Sipeos takes a similar approach to its food. The restaurant voluntarily places a huge number of constraints on what it creates. And the result is a great deal of creativity.
Firstly, there is the constraint of serving vegetarian food. Especially for Middle Eastern and Mediterranean cuisine—where a big hunk of lamb often makes the meal—only serving vegetarian fare is a big constraint to start with.
But Sipeos takes this approach further. Shah told me that the restaurant has no fryers and doesn’t even have a stove. Everything is baked or prepared as fresh items.
This forces a huge amount of creativity in how they prepare their food. Dips feature prominently on the menu as big parts of mezze platters, and as we’ll get to below, they even manage to serve a delicious falafel despite not having a fryer.
Sipeos also has a highly creative cocktail program, again also built around constraints. The restaurant focuses on low-alcohol or no-alcohol cocktails, rather than conventional full-strength cocktails built around spirits.
Instead, highly creative cocktails using wines, vermouths, sherries, and other lower-alcohol ingredients are on the menu.
Shhh…
Beyond these creative constraints, one of the coolest things about eating at Sipeos is that they have a top-secret menu.
Speak the secret password (the secret words as “inside table”), and your server will bring out a box, which will open with a dramatic flourish.
Inside is a bound book with several secret menu items.
When we visited, my wife and I focused our meal almost exclusively on the secret menu. (Sipeos hosted us for our meal so we could photograph and review the restaurant, and Bay Area Telegraph covered gratuity.)
We started with a gigantic mezze platter from the secret menu.
This filled the entire table. It would be plenty big enough to serve a group of four or more.
It featured a variety of dips, warm pita bread, veggies, and more.
We especially loved the Whipped Feta dip, which is made with honey and fermented chili oil. It was unlike anything we’d tried before.
I especially liked the Gastrique Braised Beets dip, made with sesame and miso. It had a sweet flavor and went perfectly with the hot and crispy pita bread.
We took much of this platter home, and I ended up eating it for several days as leftovers. Even our kids enjoyed the beets!
We also tried halloumi cheese from the secret menu.
This is served almost like a very fancy Greek mozzarella stick. The cheese is breaded and baked to a crispiness that makes it perfect for dipping into all the various sauces on the platter.
The lack of a fryer does not seem to have impacted their ability to make a tasty twist on a classic!
There’s a falafel burger on the secret menu as well, which we didn’t get to try but which looked great.
We did, however, get to try the Baked Falafel. This is one of the most surprising items on the menu.
Shah told me that his wife, Dhruma, who runs the restaurant with him, tried almost 30 variations of falafel before arriving at the recipe they serve.
Falafels normally thrive on being fried in oil. Sipeos’ Baked Falafel was crispy and delicious despite being baked instead of fried. I’m a fairly harsh critic of falafel in general and have high standards, and I was shocked that a baked falafel tasted this good.
For meat eaters, Sipeos also makes creative use of meat alternatives. Shah told me that a devout carnivore had come to the restaurant, didn’t know it was vegetarian, and was disappointed to discover this.
Shah served him the restaurant’s Impossible “Meat” Balls. Made with Impossible beef, these meatballs have a strong beefy flavor and are served in a tomato sauce with Parmesan cheese and a whipped feta drizzle that complements them perfectly.
The carnivore apparently couldn’t believe that these were vegetarian and thought something had gone wrong and he had been served meat! I can vouch for the fact that my son, who loves meat in all forms, enjoyed the meatballs and felt they tasted just like the real thing.
Fascinating Beverages
Also, in the line of thriving within constraints, Sipeos’ beverage menu is different from what you’ll find elsewhere.
Many of their cocktails are built around creative combinations of wine and other lower-alcohol ingredients, including sherry, vermouth, and aperitifs.
Hetal told me that tahini features prominently on their menu throughout many of the dishes. This even extends into the cocktail menu.
I had Tahini in a Bottle, a milk-clarified cocktail made with white port, Mommenpop Ruby Grapefruit aperitif, honey, cinnamon, tahini, and lemon. It was delicious.
The drink is crystal clear. It has a refreshing sweetness and a depth of flavor that subtly evokes tahini without bashing you over the head with it.
Sipeos also has an excellent wine menu, including wines from local producers. We tried wines from Wente and other nearby vineyards that went perfectly with the items on the mezze platter. The menu features Wente’s Riva Ranch Chardonnay, among other California wines.
For dessert, Sipeos focuses on Straus soft serve topped with creative items that tie into the Middle Eastern theme.
We got the Dark Chocolate Tahini soft serve, topped with chocolate, tahini, olive oil, and vanilla salt, which was delicious. There’s also a Dubai Chocolate flavor, featuring chocolate, pistachio cream, and pistachio kataifi.
The Verdict
Overall, we were very impressed with Sipeos.
Often, vegetarian food is all about deprivation. You get overly salty or overly spicy dishes trying to make up for the lack of meat.
Or you get non-meat items ridiculously masquerading as meat. If somebody serves me a tofu steak and tells me, “It tastes just like real meat, you won’t know the difference!” I run for the hills!
Sipeos does not take this approach to vegetarian food. Rather than focusing on what’s lacking when you eliminate meat, it leans into the creative possibilities of working with all-vegetarian ingredients.
The result is dishes that focus on high-quality ingredients but also go far beyond the idea of simply eliminating meat from a dish and calling it vegetarian.
Ingredients like whipped feta, tahini, and even high-tech meat alternatives blend with traditional Mediterranean flavors to make this feel like the kind of experience that even a carnivore would choose, rather than something a person might do just in the name of healthy eating or a diet.
The creative drinks and plenty of nonalcoholic options are a great complement to this approach as well.
The top-secret menu creates an added layer of fun and playfulness to the whole dining experience. I absolutely recommend ordering off this menu, as the things we had from it were some of the best at the restaurant.
Now that you’re in on the secret, you can visit and try it out or pass on the code (“inside table”) to your friends!
We will definitely be coming back to Sipeos. We might even take devout carnivore friends of our own there, secure in the knowledge that even meat eaters will love this place.
