Vegan Restaurant Rant

Three to five times a day, 365 days a year, you will find us in the kitchen on our organic family farm, preparing good vegan meals and snacks from scratch. Growing and preparing utterly fresh, delicious foods occupies a major portion of our time and, for us, provides the surest route for finding joy in being alive. Yet, not once, never once has anything in our kitchen ever tasted like the food we’ve been served in vegetarian/vegan restaurants. With the land to care for and a tendency towards homebody-ness, our attempts to dine out are truly few, but there have been those occasions on which we’ve been traveling or when we’ve felt curious about a restaurant we’ve seen that we have brushed the compost from our shoes and the tomato seeds from our hair in an effort to go stepping out on the town.

The outcomes haven’t been good.

In fact, we have encountered 3 repeat scenarios at vegan/vegetarian restaurants that have left us bewildered and disgruntled and out a half a weeks’ worth of what might be our typical spend on food, and if you dine out at these ‘alternative’ eateries, I bet you’ll recognize these experiences:

Vegan Restaurant Problem 1
No, buttermilk is not vegan

Vegan diners all take risks when dining at conventional restaurants and trying to order from the one or two choices that don’t seem to contain animal products. I remember going to a pizza place once after making absolutely sure that the pizza crust did not have any type of dairy in it and eating a pizza with some tomato sauce and vegetables on it…only to find out after this meal that, well, yes, the pizza crust did have milk in it. More fool me for trying to eat at a pizza restaurant. But, contrast this to the scenario of the first restaurant I ever ate at with my husband – an establishment touting it’s vegan food as well as all kinds of other things I didn’t exactly understand about macrobiotics and fermentation. On the menu was an item I was rather excited about – Vegan Pancakes. Now, as any vegan will tell you, making good pancakes without eggs is something of a prized accomplishment, so I asked the waitress what kind of vegan pancakes these were.

“Oh,” she smiled, “they are buttermilk pancakes.”
“Buttermilk?”
“Mmm hmm.”
“I’m sorry, I’m a little confused. How is that vegan?” I asked with tremendous curiosity.
“I’ll go check,” she said and disappeared into a back room, only to return a few minutes later with the non sequitur reply, “They are made with powdered buttermilk.”

And there you have it. This restaurant promoting itself as vastly vegan-friendly had somehow concluded that dehydrating buttermilk magically turned it into a vegan product. As I recall, we ordered some french fries, prayed they hadn’t been cooked in powdered lard and went home hungry…and laughing.

Vegan Restaurant Problem 2
Veggie burgers with a side of nose rings

Go to a fancy restaurant in New Orleans and you will be served by solemn, formally-clothed elderly gentlemen who look as if they have been pressed, polished and shined within an inch of their lives. Tremendous care for patron comfort is evinced in every word, gesture and appointment. Spotless tables and graceful, respectful service are hallmarks. Now, go to a veggie restaurant in California and try very hard not to notice the tattoos covering your server’s shaved skull and the large metal rings impaling his eyebrows, nostrils and lips. Try not to wonder whether those nose rings leak while he is serving your meal…try not to wonder what the cook looks like behind that swinging door.

To each his own; I truly believe that, but I also believe that public service carries a small duty of respect. Basic good hygiene is appetizing and the sight of excessive snarled hair and self impalement do not activate the gastric juices necessary to proper digestion, at least for me. What is this all about? Is there something about being vegan I don’t understand, some mantra that states, “Yes, we don’t eat animals, and we also never take a bath. Ha-ha!”

We take the trouble to tidy up out of respect for the special event of eating out, but time and again, I have been less-than-impressed by the lack of respect alternative restaurants show for diners by hiring servers who are so self-absorbed with expressing their personal style that they are oblivious to concepts of serving the public in a cleanly-looking manner. Where food is present, sanitation is key, and tattered t-shirts and scabby nose rings do not suggest cleanly restaurant practices.

By contrast, my husband and I once went to a veggie/vegan restaurant that was so beautiful, so elegant, so thoughtfully cared for that we were literally amazed. This was a unique experience for us, sitting at a pretty table overlooking the ocean, being deftly served by skilled waiters in black pants and white shirts. It wasn’t anything excessive, but the evident care that had been put into patron comfort made this one dining out experience a pleasant and memorable one, and so different from what we’d seen at other places that seemed to have confused vegan dining with the mosh pit at a punk concert in 1982.

Vegan Restaurant Problem 3
Man does not live by portabello mushrooms alone

Problem #3 is the big one for me: what is with the weird, weird, food served at veg-oriented restaurants? I mentioned this at the beginning of this article. Nothing I have ever prepared in our farm’s kitchen remotely resembles the entrees presented at any of the public eateries we’ve patronized.

Let’s say you’re on the road. You’ve spent the day hiking through the woods, playing on the beach, working up a huge appetite. You may even be starting to feel a little head-achy for need of a good, nourishing supper. You go to the veggie restaurant and they set before your famished eyes…a plate of portabello mushrooms. Like thick slabs of chewy kitchen sponge, this is the restaurant’s solution to your nutritional needs.

Now, I love mushrooms. We’re like hobbits around here and can’t get enough of little button mushrooms, added to other ingredients in filling, hearty fare. But who is going to be able to satisfy their stomach, let alone their body’s needs, with a giant piece of fungus? Even if it’s adorned with a nasturtium blossom. I ask you.

Then there are all of the faux dishes. Now, there a people who can do faux and people who can’t, and I’ve come to the conclusion that alternative type restaurants just can’t. I can make a ‘chicken’ stew that you’d pay me a fistful of bills for, but at the last veggie restaurant my family went to, I was served a ‘taco’ made of raw dough with ‘cheese’ on it that looked and tasted exactly like shaving cream. I literally couldn’t eat it.

Is it the California cuisine culture, infested as it is with $75 entrees consisting of a quail egg on an arugula leaf, that is responsible for the weird, weird food at alternative eateries? I don’t know, but I’d like to blame someone or something, wouldn’t you? Every time I think of this plate of 5 tasteless raviolis swimming in a giant dish of melted New Balance margarine that was supposed to pass for beurre blanc sauce, I get queasy all over again.

Let me say it once and for all: Vegan Food Is Not Weird Food. And, while we’re on the subject, nowhere in the description of a vegan diet will you find that salt, oil or any of the other non-animal spices of life are prohibited. People who have managed to be vegan for decades (count me amongst them) cannot be living on cardboard and flower blossoms…they can’t!

And, so, my plea to all good people going into the veg restaurant business: give us something real to eat. How about cooking up a pot of beans, making some homemade tortillas, giving us some fresh guacamole and topping that with tomatoes and lettuce from your restaurant garden? How about a pot of yellow split pea soup or a steaming, veggie-loaded minestrone. How about hummus and tabbouleh? How about some fresh tamales, scalloped potatoes or a heaping helping of black-eyed peas and savory johnny cakes? Look, I’m afraid you’ll just have to come to my house and I’ll show you what I’m talking about. I’ll even give your waiter a clean shirt to wear and buy him a comb…

Maybe, I’m being a little silly here. The truth is, going to restaurants just isn’t a habit with us. They are expensive and something of an ordeal to get to in contrast to walking into our own kitchen and having something really satisfying to eat right now. But maybe, if the veg restaurants could eradicate the 3 common problems I’ve listed, we’d find ourselves a little more tempted to dine out. As things are, when we go on a trip, we literally pack our car with food and only stay at lodgings that have a kitchenette so that we can cook well wherever we go. The psychological and physical importance of proper eating is truly vital to us and to all people. You’d think that, in going to the unusual trouble of opening a vegan restaurant, the owner would have that fact set in stone as rule number one.

So, pass me the beans my veggie friends, but allow me to pass on the grilled portabellos.

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