Published: Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Updated: Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Katherine Medlin/The Daily Texan

Patrick Ortiz from Simply Fit Meals on Nueces Street prepares 400 pancakes for an event the restaurant catered. The establishment offers nutritious foods for students on the go.

In a space barely bigger than a college dorm room sits two small, round tables, a wall of refrigerators and a small, black microwave in the corner. As an all-natural, organic-food restaurant, one would think Simply Fit Meals would be against instant cooking, but pre-packaged food and eating on-the-go is what the new restaurant is all about.

Simply Fit Meals, located on Nueces and 24th streets, offers pre-packaged breakfast, lunch, dinner and snack options made from scratch with fresh produce. The meals are marketed toward active, health-conscious Austin residents.

Meals are offered in “5K” and “10K” sizes, which are based on calorie content. The microwaveable meals remain fresh for up to five days.

The idea of Simply Fit Meals was born when college buddies Chris Sanchez and Patrick Ortiz combined all of their passions — food, health, fitness and traveling.

Sanchez started out as a personal trainer and later worked in the marketing department of Whole Foods Market. It wasn’t until he became a consultant for a business similar to Simply Fit Meals that Sanchez decided he wanted to revitalize health food companies. At that job, however, he could only give advice and had little control over the company’s actions. He said the company would claim their food was fresh when it was actually frozen.

Ortiz, who has a background in food and beverage management, began working with casinos in Louisiana and Las Vegas after college, overseeing food production. Ultimately, he wanted to be in the kitchen.

So, Sanchez combined his business ideas with Ortiz’s food background and created Simply Fit Meals.

Ortiz said cooking for Simply Fit Meals has increased his appreciation for details. Making the food has taken a lot of discipline and refinery, he said. He has to take raw ingredients and make meals that taste good, without depending on artificial flavorings and preservatives for quick results.

Since West Campus’s retail space is extremely expensive, Sanchez said it was not a smart choice for a new small business to invest in a large space. As a result, the company is split into two, with all cooking done in East Austin and the West Campus store, a place for customers to pick up their pre-packaged food.

Ortiz spends eight hours during midday or evening prepping and cooking the food in the company’s East Austin kitchen, where it is then delivered to the store for labeling and stocking.

Sanchez said because Simply Fit Meals’s concept is about being on-the-go, the store could be even smaller, without tables and chairs — stripped down to just the refrigerators and a cashier. The store also sells products like whole-wheat bread, organic skim milk, yogurts, organic peanut butter and strawberry jam in.

The restaurant’s philosophy is about saying no to frozen, artificial, processed, unbalanced and canned foods. Ortiz said they want to take the food back to its basics and create meals in the simplest form. They don’t use any white sugar, white flour or sweeteners and avoid excess seasonings and salt.

“People should get used to eating food the way it is meant to be cooked,” Sanchez said, adding that what your body is getting is real, clean fuel.

He said the restaurant tries to incorporate local products as much as possible but is unable to do so 100 percent of the time because it is a growing business and has yet to develop buying power. However, he said the company does alter its menu to reflect the season’s crop.

“We found food that was really appetizing and worked backwards to creating [it],” Sanchez said. “We didn’t try to make things [up off] the top of our heads. We went straight for comfort food.”

For their Camp Gladiator Power pancakes, which are made up of organic whole-wheat flour, bananas, walnuts, protein powder and organic flax seed, agave nectar is incorporated in the pancake mix to sweeten the taste and to act as a substitute for syrup.

The pancakes, after being heated in the microwave for about a minute and a half, were soft and did not have an elastic texture. And the sweetness of the bananas and the nectar made you forget it was a healthy option.

Their spaghetti and meatballs recreate the classic dish with organic whole-wheat pasta and homemade sauce. For the meatballs, they used lean, free-range, grass-fed, locally sourced bison meat. Sanchez said bison meat is a healthy choice for protein because the meat is lean with little fat. And as for their pasta sauce, Sanchez said they make tomato sauce from scratch using local, farm vegetables instead of canned products.

While traditional spaghetti and meatballs is flavorful with a hint of oregano and garlic, the restaurant’s version lacked taste. The pasta was cooked perfectly, and the sauce was decent without having any excess salt added, but the downfall of the dish was the extremely dry and bland meatballs.

Even though Simply Fit Meals’ food does not taste like cardboard, which is often the expectation of health foods, it definitely did not live up to the restaurant’s hype.

Simply Fit Meals also offers a getting fit program. For $500, customers get breakfast, lunch and dinner, plus 42 snacks, for three weeks. The program also includes three consultations with a registered dietitian and a three-week membership to Camp Gladiator, a boot camp.