Back to nature: The Eutropheon

Last week’s post on a recipe from The Aware Inn, an early natural food restaurant in Los Angeles, took me back to founder Jim Baker and his adventures with the Nature Boys. I learned that some of the members of this group, who lived in the woods, dressed like Tarzan, and ate natural foods, worked at a Los Angeles raw food restaurant called The Eutropheon.

Just by its name, readers might suspect it was more about spreading the gospel of raw food diets than an ordinary money-making commercial eating place. They would be right.

A raw food restaurant, not yet named The Eutropheon, but very likely run by Eutropheon founders Vera and John Richter, was established in Los Angeles in 1919. It was evidently affiliated with, or at least sympathetic to, The New Justice, a short-lived publication dedicated to defending the Russian revolution [the 1919 advertisement here appeared in the magazine]. A story in the Los Angeles Times reported that the restaurant played Hawaiian music on a phonograph, distributed a leaflet called “The Truth About Russia,” and displayed a copy of the Soviet constitution along with a portrait of American socialist leader Eugene Debs. Its menu included uncooked soup, fruit and flower salads, and unbaked breads and pies.

In 1920 the Raw Food Dining Room had a new Los Angeles address, 326 W 2nd. In 1922, there was a Raw Food Dining Room, now called The Eutropheon, in Long Beach CA, as well as in Los Angeles at 927½ W 6th. How many of these were open at the same time is uncertain. There was also a Vegetarian Cafeteria on Figueroa serving “A complete line of Cooked and Raw Foods,” but this must have been run by someone other than the Richters since they were never known to serve cooked food. A Eutropheon cropped up in San Francisco in 1926, at 574 California Street. In 1928 the Richters had two Eutropheons in Los Angeles, one at 209 S. Hill and the other at 833 S. Olive.

There appear to have been very few raw food advocates in the United States, and almost no restaurants (until relatively recently), making the Richters pioneers. There were, however, some raw food enthusiasts in the US prior to The Eutropheon. Plans were laid by the Chicago Raw Food Society to open a raw food restaurant there around 1900 or 1901, but it’s unclear if it ever materialized. In 1907 a group in New York City held a raw food banquet at a hotel there. There was also a group in Cincinnati in the early 1920s.

John T. Richter, as he was known in Los Angeles, had come to the city around 1918 or 1919, opened a raw food restaurant, and began lecturing on the benefits of that diet and other aspects of natural living. When and how he met his wife Vera is unknown as is anything about her background, but she seems to be a key figure in the raw food movement in Los Angeles. Judging from her 1925 cookbook Mrs. Richter’s Cook-less Book, she may have developed many of the recipes for soups, salads, grain and nut dishes, and desserts that were served in The Eutropheon.

Before coming to California, Richter was known as Theophilus J. F. Richter. At least 20 years older than Vera, he was born of German immigrants in Illinois in 1864, grew up in North Dakota, and earned a diploma sometime in the late 1880s or the 1890s in “Swedish movement cure” in Chicago, probably from the Folke-Kjellberg Institute. He married a woman named Violet in Chicago in 1891 and they had three children. After living in Fargo for several years, the family moved to Minneapolis and Theophilus obtained a degree as a naturopathic physician. Evidently he adopted a raw food diet around 1911 after taking classes with Chicago doctor George Drews. He still gave his address as Minneapolis as late as 1917.

The Richters received quite a bit of publicity for their restaurant from Los Angeles naturopath and gymnasium owner Phillip Lovell. Lovell also had a radio show and wrote the “Care of the Body” column that appeared in the Los Angeles Times in the 1920s and 1930s espousing alternative medicine and health regimes. Declaring himself a regular patron of the Richter’s restaurants, Lovell wrote in 1928, “To my knowledge, these are the only two restaurants in the country that function without the aid of a cookstove.”

Why Lovell’s career and The Eutropheons attained success in California is an interesting question. It’s doubtful the Richters got rich but the fact that their restaurants survived for about 20 years is surprising given that raw food restaurants were found nowhere else at that time. As for Lovell, he amassed enough money to commission architect Richard Neutra to build the first steel-frame ultramodern house in the US. It was completed in 1929 and contained a full-size gymnasium. I suspect that the reason California was such fertile ground for health and fitness gurus had something to do with the large number of people, especially the elderly, who vacationed or moved there from the Midwest hoping the climate would cure their ills.

Sometime in the late 1930s it appears that the Richters turned over The Eutropheon at 833 S. Olive to Milan Geshtacoff who had once been a kitchen worker there. How long it stayed open and what the fate of the S. Hill street location was I don’t know.