Synopsis
“REVELATIONS CAFÉ: Food for the Soul” is a feature length documentary film that tells the story of Mia and Robby Graham, two improbable founders of a unique plant-based, faith-based café in Lutz, Florida. With little more than divine inspirations, Mia and Robby built their dream café from the ground up in a former mattress store with no existing kitchen. They had a vision for a café based on their Christian faith, but they had no experience in the restaurant business and their menu did not include meat or alcohol. Considering these challenges, and the fact that half of all new restaurants fail, they faced long odds.
When Producer-Director John Corry (FORKS OVER KNIVES, THE BOWDEN DYNASTY), stumbled on a Facebook post announcing the café’s opening in February 2019 he reached out to Robby, his friend back in high school, and the two reacquainted. After a surprisingly successful first year in operation, the Covid pandemic struck in March 2020 and Revelations Café was shut down. It was during those quiet weeks that Mia and Robby decided to rebrand their café before it reopened. First, they made the menu even healthier with new Chef Lori Martin’s expertise and a prepared frozen food line. Then they dedicated themselves to exploring as many ways as possible to promote the plant-based lifestyle outside the café to the local community.
Mia and Robby contacted Nelson and Kim Campbell representing the nonprofit PlantPure Communities to set up a local support and advocacy group called a “pod” to educate others about the benefits of a whole foods, plant-based diet. They also reached out to Mia’s ex-husband, Martin Revello, to bring a 10-day plant-based immersion program to his Independent Physicians Association, veriMED. The immersion program enables primary care doctors to literally prescribe healthy food instead of medicine to show patients with common chronic diseases that there is an alternative to pills and procedures. Patients can literally eat their way to renewed health. Finally, they reached out to John Corry to document their transition as they navigated through the pandemic and relaunched their café with their new mission.
What developed was a cautionary tale told by the people in the Café and the local area that touches on issues most American’s can relate to such as aging wisely, nursing home care, our bloated Medicare system, and personal responsibility for our immune system – the need for people to take care of their own bodies – described in the bible as “the temple of the Holy Spirit.”
As we learn, Mia and Robby didn’t always take care of themselves. They met seven years ago in an AA meeting while Robby was in the Salvation Army recovering from pain pill addiction and Mia was celebrating her first year of sobriety. After three years of marriage, Mia began to form her vision for the Café, supported by the inspiration she received from her daily devotions.
Robby supported her strategy to make the café vegetarian, but he wasn’t onboard with that diet in his personal life. In the fall of 2018, during the café’s construction, Robby suffered a heart attack in the middle of a workout. A former bodybuilder who prided himself on looking good on the outside, Robby was surprisingly unhealthy on the inside. At the age of 57, he turned to the plant-based diet to speed his recovery. More importantly, he jumped onboard with Mia’s vison of a café where people got healthier, not sicker, from the food on the menu.
Best-selling authors and internationally recognized lecturers Dr. T. Colin Campbell and Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn also appear in the film
(Documentary, Running time 95 mins, 2021)