BRITTANY GARNER THE WAKE & TAKE

from Dining Out Summer/Fall 2022

ADAM MEDINA RANCHOS

The Wake & Take

Brittany Garner

Like a warm hug from mama — soy sauce. Brittany Garner, owner-chef of the vegan café The Wake & Take in Arroyo Seco, puts it on “oh, God, everything.”

“It’s a tie to my mom who passed a couple of years ago,” says Garner, who’s half-Japanese and grew up eating mom’s wontons and fried rice and inari dipped in the salty brown liquid. “Cooking is how she expressed her love. It’s definitely a sentimental thing.”

A warm hug, or a warm blanket — a nice soy-sauce-based sauce blanketing whatever Garner throws in a wok and serves up to her three young kids, who find a common tasting ground in a good teriyaki dish. Resourceful and convenient.

At the restaurant, soy sauce goes in the miso, the spicy teriyaki vinaigrette.

“It’s bled out into everything,” says Garner, 34, whose culinary skills were further Asian-inspired after leaving her hometown in northern Georgia for Maui on an externship from Le Cordon Bleu in Atlanta. She found such joy in Hawaiian celebration through food, the avocados as big as her hands put together.

“There was a coming home feeling,” she says.

Garner eventually followed that chef to Taos, where she met her now-husband/business partner/Taos native, Noah Pettus, while working in the kitchen at El Monte Sagrado. The two owned ACEQ before opening The Wake & Take three years ago.

Along with soy sauce smothered goodness, the breakfast and lunch spot serves up acaí bowls, like “the Oden,” which is an acaí-and-peanut-butter-heavy smoothie swim for the tastebuds. There are dishes using local anasazi beans and house-made tempeh bacon and even “The Gaucho,” a riceand-bean-based burrito full of anasazi beans and — you guessed it — that teriyaki vinaigrette.

“My food is going to wrap you in love and comfort,” says Garner. “Noah’s got more tangy, layered flavors. He uses a lot of vinegar. There’s an edge to it. His food says, ‘I’m going to make your taste buds think about what you’re eating.’”