Secluded Inn Dishes Up Food for Body and Soul

The Inn of the Seventh Ray, deep in the heart of Topanga Canyon, is the kind of restaurant where you expect to hear Johann Pachelbel’s Canon in D while you wait for a table.

And you are likely to hear it, if you get tired of browsing through works about Jesus’ years in Tibet and the like in the Spiral Staircase, the inn’s adjoining bookstore, where prospective diners are sometimes sent while a table is being prepared.

Among the bookstore’s offerings is a pamphlet called “Pinstripe Prayers,” which contains such moving lyrics as “Prayer Before Firing Someone” and “Prayer for Coping With an Office Temptation.”

With its emphasis on Eastern mysticism and home-grown eccentricity, the bookstore is good practice for visitors to the inn, whose food for eating is more conventional than its food for thought.

Unconventional Serenity

What’s unconventional is the serenity of the place. That is one of its foremost charms, along with the setting: Tucked beside a stream surrounded by trees, the inn may be the only outdoor restaurant in Southern California where you can’t see the parking lot or road.

Most of the 150 tables are outdoors, which is fun for Sunday brunch, and in winter they serve food in a converted Foursquare Gospel Church, where old-timers have reported seeing evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson way back when.

Inside there’s a wood stove, comforting music and good wine, and pretty soon even the most churlish visitors are likely to forget the bookstore and have a good time.

“The original idea was to give people a kind of retreat experience,” said Ralph Yaney, who owns the restaurant and bookstore with his wife, Lucile. “We encourage people to relax and take their time.”

Started as Hobby

The Yaneys, both psychotherapists, started the inn in 1975 as a weekend hobby and lost money on it for years. The restaurant was also an outgrowth of their spiritual search.

Lucile said they experimented with a variety of experiences, religious and otherwise, and they are now followers of Elizabeth Clare Prophet, who wrote “The Lost Years of Jesus” and is known to her followers as “Guru Ma.”

Prophet, who heads the Calabasas-based Church Universal and Triumphant, teaches that she is in direct contact with Jesus and Buddha, and was Queen Guinevere in a former life. During the current trial of a lawsuit by a disgruntled former congregant, Prophet testified that the authority of the Roman Catholic Church was transferred to her in a cosmic message from the late Pope John XXIII.

The Yaneys, who said they often hire Prophet’s followers to work in their eatery, fast regularly.

“We started trying to cleanse our bodies and get ourselves not to be so dense,” she said. “Whenever we found anything new, we would try it out on our patients.”

Accordingly, the menu refers to “your body elemental--that selfless shy invisible little fellow who works hard to keep the oft mistreated human machine going.” It also says the staff, which has a tendency to smile unnervingly, has pledged to eschew “harmful substances to allow them to be more receptive to that finer vibration which is the secret ingredient in our food.”

Order of Entrees

Apparently vibrating invisibly, the entrees are listed on the dinner menu “in order of their esoteric vibrational value for your experimentation.”

First comes Five Secret Rays, which is steamed vegetables and brown rice in tahini sauce. Several increasingly elaborate vegetable dishes are next, culminating in lasagna, followed by fish, scallops, chicken, lamb and, finally, a charcoal-broiled New York steak.

Ralph explained that he and Lucile were vegetarians for about six years but decided they had a need for red meat occasionally.

Neither is a professional chef--Ralph, 58, is a psychiatrist and Lucile, 47, is a psychologist--but somebody back in the kitchen has a way with swordfish, the Yaneys wisely having abandoned their initial idea for a beef fondue restaurant.

The folks at the inn also make their own pesto, using macadamia nuts instead of pignoli. And at brunch, which is really quite a spread, they have lox marinated in dill, brandy and rock salt. For the lasagna, they make the pasta by hand.

Wedding Locale

But the inn is also a business. Under professional management now, it grosses $1 million a year, half of it in summer, and it is also profitable. The Yaneys say their place is particularly popular for weddings, of which they do about 40 a year, and has been featured in Bride’s magazine.

The Yaneys, who live in Calabasas, clearly enjoy owning their restaurant and said they would consider opening a second if they could find a partner. Ralph said they have been writing a food book “for the last 10 years,” and still have hopes of finishing it.

If you’re wondering how the place got to be called the Inn of the Seventh Ray, Lucile says, it’s because “light passing through a crystal splits into seven rays,” each symbolizing a type of energy.

The seventh ray, she says, is violet, and is “the ray of transition,” just as “our culture is going through transition,” either to a Golden Age or destruction.

Whatever the outcome, there should be plenty of time for brunch in the interim.