Restaurant review, Aloka, Brighton.

They are not the words you hope to hear on being shown to your table in a new restaurant: "Enjoy the space. Enjoy the emptiness". But Aloka isn't just a restaurant. It's a 'Quality of Life Centre' in the heart of alternative Brighton, a holistic spa serving vegan and raw food. Here, a dinner service for only two customers isn't a problem, but an opportunity to connect with stillness and mindfulness. Those empty tables just represent the road less travelled.

It would be all too easy to make fun of Aloka. But I'm not here to do that. I'm here because my Brighton friend Marina has summoned me, excited by the quality of the food on offer at Aloka's buffet counter. In the tiny storefront café, you can fill a box with vegan goodies, pay by weight, and eat at a shared table, or head off for a picnic on the beach. Upstairs, there's a restaurant, open in the evenings, and it was there that we made our – as it turns out, unnecessary – dinner reservation.

Bravely, Aloka is situated almost directly opposite Terre a Terre, one of Britain's busiest and most famous vegetarian restaurants, whose steady stream of customers Marina and I were able to watch arriving from our window-side table in Aloka's empty dining room.

In contrast to the warm, woody feel of most vegetarian restaurants, Aloka is as white and shiny as an operating theatre. White moulded plastic chairs and linen-shrouded tables give it the feel of an upmarket cosmetic-surgery clinic. There are pendant lamps made from what look like test tubes, and chill-out temple fusion pulses from the sound system. So far, so spa.

But the food is a treatment in itself – colourful, healthy and crazily inventive. Normally a menu might offer up a few unfamiliar ingredients. Here there are whole strings of them – the 'Botanical Living Special', for example, which reads like a spam e-mail: 'Nshiki-Dori Market daikon layered terrine, nori white miso "rice" crackers, soramame and peavetta, dulse kimpi, "raw".' What, no 'Vigara' [sic]?

With its emphasis on Asian ingredients and use of sprouting, fermentation and dehydration, Aloka aligns itself firmly within the modernist wing of the vegetarian movement. The menu offers no meat or fish, obviously, but also no eggs or dairy, and no refined flour, sugar or grains.

The balance falls roughly 50/50 between the raw and the cooked. A mezze platter contained more vegetables than the average corner shop, most of them elaborately primped and prepped – a vivid shot of raw butternut squash and apple soup; peppery beetroot crisps; griddled aubergine wrapped round something ratatouille-ish; pliable linseed crispbreads for dipping in tapenade or a cashew nut and cardamom dip; various unidentified, but mostly delicious, gloops and grains. And weirdly, amid all those raw ingredients, a sprig of oven-roasted grapes and two piping-hot tomatoes, adding a levelling touch of the full English to an other-wordly plateful.

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