Air quotes get a bad rap. If they had an entry in The Chicago Manual of Style, they would be described as a symbol of artifice or disguise. Contained within those four crooked, bouncing fingers are sarcasm, vitriol and nefarious language games. Air quotes are usually the tool of vicious psychopathic despots with hidden agendas and malapropism-spewing middle managers who decorate their offices with Successories posters.

Yet, when you look around Live, every few minutes you'll catch a server in a mid-menu breakdown, punctuating the void with their middle and index fingers. It's not because they're stuffing the "hazelnut falafels" with used dental instruments or ricin. It's because there's an utter lack of a modern, illustrative lexicon to describe the particle accelerator of innovation that's happening in Live's open kitchen. Experiencing the food is like being parachuted into a foreign country without a guidebook or translator: exhilarating and unexpected, an authentic revelation of raw ingredients. Is there a Berlitz translation for "cashew cheese"?

What's particularly interesting about Live is that, by and large, their "cooking" isn't really cooking at all -- the stove only gets pulled off the bench for three minor dishes that involve steaming rice and vegetables. The rest of Live's food is pure exhibitionism: raw and vegan. The entire menu is delightfully sluttish: changing every two weeks, occasionally leaving regular Johns wondering how they're going to get their fix of old favourites.

This was the case when the Sunnyside Up Pâté with salad and sprouts ($10.50) disappeared into the night. Sprouted sunflower seeds were tangled in a tahini so intense with garlic, ginger and lemon it left us feeling a little dizzy and flushed with flavour-induced euphoria. (As my dining colleague scooped the last blob of pâté with the second-to-last sliver of perfect raw cracker, she whispered, "Lighten up, kitten. You look like someone just killed your unicorn-pony.")

The dismay passed after the first few bites of the Live It Up Lasagna ($8). It is a culinary incident not unlike being flashed; a delicious taste-bud violation of crisp, translucent skeins of pale green zucchini (posing as noodles), layered with a smooth cashew paste (posing as ricotta cheese), bright tomato marinade, basil pesto, fresh starchy corn niblets, all pulled together with a dense, salty black olive tapenade.

A Popeye Pizza ($6.50) is only cartoonish in that it should come with appropriate captions: a ZAP! for the sharp sweetness of the marinated red onions, a POW! for the dense, crunchy sprouted buckwheat crust, a BANG! for the Thousand Island-inspired drizzle of creamy cashew and sun-dried tomato sauce and a BLORT (?) for the Brazil nut cheese (a delicious and intriguing concoction that made us long for a better understanding of quantum chemistry).

Less surprising -- though equally well-executed -- are the dishes created with the help of that old warming implement referred to as "stove." A creamed chickpea filling is further goo-ified by vegan mayonnaise, lit up with scallions and rounded out with toasted spices, then wrapped in kale leaves to simulate a tuna sandwich ($7). The Buddha Bowl ($10) is served over brown rice and toes a more conventional vegetarian line, with lemongrass-marinated tofu triangles, a chiffonade of raw cabbage and delicately steamed leaves of bok choy. The Bowl's deification arrives in the form of a superbly rich and subtle gado-gado sauce, so warm, comforting and nutty you'll feel like you ate Christmas.

Despite the omnipresence of air quotes at Live, things are exactly as they seem, proving (somewhat disconcertingly) that honesty is, in fact, the best policy. Or, at the very least, a cunning option.

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