Click here to read Juliano's bio.

Right-click on any photo to download a print quality version.
Right-click on any photo to download a print quality version.
Right-click on any photo to download a print quality version.

About Juliano

Juliano was raised in his father's meat-heavy Italian restaurant and in front of a TV set in his parents' Las Vegas home. At 15, he moved with his family to Palm Springs where he spent his days exploring Tahquitz Canyon, a ribbon of natural oases slashed into a desert mountain.

One day "An eagle soared out from the distant trees down to the pool and ascended with a fish clamped in her talons," he writes in the preface to "RAW." "Frogs sunbathed on giant rocks. And I, for the first time, felt a part of nature instead of a distant bystander watching the world on the tube."

He immediately became vegetarian, he says. At 19, he became vegan, giving up all animal products. Finally, he went raw. "It's been four years since I ate cooked food," he says. "For the first year-and-a-half, I cheated. I ate cooked vegan foods I made myself, and when I did, I felt awful."

To eat raw properly, don't go cold-turkey, he advises. "You need the grains, the rices." In "RAW," he describes raw-food preparation, but a novice needs to seek nutrition advice elsewhere.

Juliano swears to this: Without cooking, his energy grew -- he sleeps as little as two hours a day -- and he felt his thinking become clearer and quicker. In search of like-minded individuals, he moved to San Francisco to join an ayurvedic yoga center. Practitioners of ayurveda, originally a Hindu medicine system, follow dietary recommendations such as always eating hot food in cold seasons.

"They said cooked rice is, like, 5,000 years old, and I said raw was, like, before fire," Juliano says. "So I moved out of the yoga center and got into the restaurant. I just opened the restaurant to eat."

His mother financed the venture, which opened in 1994, serving meatless meatloaf made of portobello mushrooms and nuts, burritos wrapped in cabbage leaves, and cheese-free, meat-free burgers served on breadlike sheets of sprouted buckwheat baked 10 hours in the sun. His sister helped develop the recipes.

His celebrity clientele grew -- Robin Williams, Michael Milken, Steve Jobs and Bryan Adams among them. He started teaching "uncooking," even training Harrelson's O2 chef, he says. To keep up, he splits most of his time between San Francisco and a Santa Monica community center with a raw-foods kitchen.

In Los Angeles, he works on his next career: screenwriting. He hopes to use his raw-food talents to connect with Hollywood financial backers. And, if they don't follow, he's still the new guru on the block preaching the gospel of clean cuisine for long life.



Juliano now runs "Juliano's Raw", a restaurant on Broadway in Santa Monica, California. Click here for more information about the menu and hours.