A Word About Restaurants

Dining out as a vegetarian can be a gratifying experience. There's a real thrill in finding a new restaurant with an array of creative vegetarian dishes. And, at those places we frequent, there is a certain satisfaction and sense of place to be experienced, knowing that we, along with the rest of the vegetarian community, constitute an important part of the clientele and keep the vegetarian items on the menu.

It goes without saying, however, that the negative side to restaurant eating for the vegetarian looms very large. When navigating the uncharted menu of a new or unfamiliar restaurant, hazards abound for the unwary vegetarian. For every new restaurant that holds some promise, there are at least five others with no redeeming social value. Dinner at one of these can mean an evening of anger, starvation, embarrassment, or all of the above.

As a fairly frequent traveler, I have the fortune, or misfortune, to try lots of new restaurants around the country. Since most of my travel is on business, the choice of these places is often not my own, and the choices are often not the greatest. Below, I've compiled a list of a few disasters that regularly befall the vegetarian restaurant diner. You can probably think of lots more.

1. There's nothing on the menu I can eat. I can't begin to count the number of times this has happened to me. Nor can I describe the sense of horror and panic in sitting down with a group of people and finding nothing (I mean nothing!) on the menu without meat in it. It usually means that one is relegated to the "old standbys" an iceberg lettuce salad and a baked potato. The "old standbys" have saved many a vegetarian from starvation. I once lived on them for a week in Texas.

2. I bet there's nothing on the menu I can eat. This may be the only thing worse than #1 above. It usually happens when you're with a group of people, you're starving, and everyone decides to go to a restaurant with a name like "The Branding Iron" or "Ed's Steak Pit." Not only are you likely to have a miserable meal, but you'll have to spend a couple of hours worrying about it beforehand.

3. My God! There's meat in this! Let's say you find something on the menu that looks all right, and you breathe a sigh of relief and order it. You're still not out of the woods. Restaurants seem to delight in subtly slipping meat into almost everything, especially when it isn't mentioned on the menu. This, of course, is most common in Chinese eateries where shreds of beef are hidden beneath the bamboo shoots and pork invades the egg rolls. But it happens in many other restaurants too. I've found chicken broth in pasta primavera, beef gravy on top of fettuccine Alfredo, and lots of Italian restaurants that put pepperoni in their salads.

4. The "Local Color" Syndrome. It can be said that restaurants in sophisticated big cities will be more likely to have good food for a vegetarian than restaurants in small towns or rural areas. While I've found this to generally be the case, it isn't always true. I've had wonderful vegetarian food in Wyoming and North Carolina and found absolutely terrible, uncreative (and very expensive) restaurants in Los Angeles and New York.

An almost foolproof way I've found to weed out a huge number of undesirable restaurants is to avoid any place that hints of having any measure of "local color." This category of restaurants obviously includes steak places in the Midwest and seafood restaurants along the coasts. But it also includes every restaurant that serves "American Cuisine," has the word "grill" in its name, or has been in the "same location for 20 years." And it includes almost every place with red carpeting and black vinyl chairs. In short, if the "locals love it," a vegetarian won't.

No matter what "local color" restaurant you go into, you'll get the same waitress. Her name is Marge, and she's worked there since she was 17 (she's about 50 now). Marge is pretty saucy and prides herself on being a "colorful character." She thinks vegetarians are communists (see #5 below).

Since you won't see anything vegetarian on the menu, you'll have to ask Marge what vegetables are available. She will curtly respond, "We don't have any vegetables," and will try to make your evening miserable from that point on. She won't even smile when she brings you the "old standbys."

5. Everybody hates me. As if the hazards set forth above aren't enough for the restaurant-going vegetarian, there is one more: by the end of the meal everyone will hate you. Even if you're lucky enough not to get Marge for a waitress, whomever you do get may be just as bad. You can't really blame the country's waiters and waitresses. After all, they've been trained to think their restaurant's prime rib is the absolute height of gastronomic perfection. And even if the vegetarian isn't directly insulting the food, he or she probably is creating some additional work.

If the people you are eating with aren't vegetarians, don't expect them to love you either. They'll be almost as embarrassed as you are when you ask if the soup of the day is made with a chicken stock or if the manicotti sauce has meat in it. While the vegetarian is desperately trying to find something to eat, everyone else at the table will be wondering to themselves why a simple thing like ordering dinner has to be made into such a production.

Sometimes it all gets to be so discouraging that I feel like eating at home the rest of my life, and packing a brown bag whenever I have to travel. But it's usually when I'm at my most demoralized that I get some encouragement—like the time in Wyoming that I found a whole list of fresh vegetables on a steak house menu, or the seafood restaurant in Florida that had wonderful black bean soup without the meat stock. Sometimes it's just a nice waiter who will take pity on me and go out of his way to see that I get fed. When something like that happens, I think maybe, on the whole, restaurants aren't so bad after all.

The “Essence of the Oyster”

A number of years ago I had the exciting and all-too-common experience of being in an unfamiliar restaurant and having the waiter make recommendations he thought would be appropriate for a vegetarian.

"You should have the oyster sauce with your vegetables," he suggested.

"But doesn't that have oysters in it?" I asked naively.

"Oh no! There aren't any actual oysters in it. You see, it's just made from…" he held his thumb and forefinger together, as if holding something precious, and smacked his lips, "…the essence of the oyster."

"Oh." I pretended to consider his suggestion for a second. "Thanks, but I think I'll just stick with the essence of broccoli."

For me the essence of the oyster incident has become a metaphor for a whole series of bad experiences. How many times have I found meat lurking in the supposedly "vegetarian" entrée? Wasn't it just the other day I had to tell the restaurant to leave the essence of the chicken broth out of my pasta? Wasn't it just last week that I found out my favorite brand of bread is now contaminated with the essence of whey? Wasn't it just today that a friend of mine who is deathly allergic to shrimp found shrimp in her "vegetarian" spring rolls? It seems to be our lot in life as vegetarians—everyone claims to know what's best for us, but what they deliver rarely meets our standards.

My mother says I'm too fussy. She hates it when I meticulously comb the ingredients in everything she buys at the grocery store. And the last time I ate out with her she was mightily embarrassed when I sent my salad back to have the hard-boiled eggs removed, and then sent it back again to have the bacon and cheese removed. (Well, how was I to know they were hiding under the eggs???) She's probably right. Eating a little bit of something bad probably won't kill me nearly as fast as agonizing about eating a little bit of something bad.

There are people who agree with my mother—arguing that from a health standpoint it may actually be better to not be so strict in our vegetarianism. I once knew a nutrition doctor (okay, so he wasn't actually a doctor) who had studied all of the world's cultures with long life expectancies. One thing he found that all of these cultures had in common was that they were almost vegetarian. They all followed a vegetarian lifestyle most of the year, but every once in a while they'd have a big blowout party where they'd roast the prize pig and wallow in greasy food. This "doctor" surmised that those occasional non-vegetarian indulgences stressed their bodies and actually made them stronger in the long run.

I was recently reminded of this theory when McDonald's made their now infamous admission that the French fries they have for years been promoting as "cooked in pure vegetable oil" are not really vegetarian—that they contain the essence of the dead cow for flavoring. The same day I heard this shocking news I read about Mary Clark of Montrose, Colorado. Mary is 106 years old, in great health, and practically lives for her daily fix of—you guessed it—McDonald's French fries. (The McDonald's corporation is thrilled with this, and has promised Mary free fries until she is 150.)

Could Mary Clark's health actually have benefited from the animal contamination in her favorite food? Would I be healthier now if I'd only eaten that essence of the oyster sauce many years ago? Would all vegetarians be better off if only we weren't so fussy?

Somehow I doubt it. First of all, any vegetarian in our society is going to ingest unwanted animal products from time to time no matter how careful he or she is, thanks to the antics of Bozos like Ronald McDonald. If our systems need occasional stress we're sure to get it. More importantly, though, there's more to being vegetarian than our own health. And the commitment we make to lofty goals—even if they are loftier than we can ever hope to achieve in the real world—is one of the things that keeps us going.

I think I'll stay fussy, and continue to object every time I'm faced with the essence of the oyster. Maybe it's silly and obsessive and irks my mother, but somehow drawing a line and sticking to it just seems like the right thing to do. Somehow it just seems like the essence of vegetarianism.

Vegetarian Travel Series, Episode #14: Vegan Dining in Big City

As one of the great cities of America, Big City has long been known for having some of the very best restaurants in the world. Today, as part of our ongoing travel series, we'll visit a few of the most renowned Big City eateries and see what kind of magic their incredible chefs can stir up for the vegan diner.

The very best place to begin our visit to Big City is with a hearty breakfast at Walter Brennan's. With its selection of incredible egg dishes and homemade pastries, Breakfast at Walter Brennan's^®
has been a Big City tradition for more than 50 years. We settle into the opulent dining room with a strong cup of coffee (sorry, no soymilk available—they must be temporarily out) and ask our waiter what dishes would be good for vegans.

"Huh?"

We explain what "vegan" means, and the waiter shrugs, pointing blankly at the menu. With a little more explanation he is able to offer some helpful suggestions and we're finally ready to order: the fruit cup and white toast, dry. "The cantaloupe is ripe," one member of our group points out. "Very evenly toasted bread," raves another.

After that delicious breakfast a shopping trip down Big City's famous 4th Avenue seems in order. It lightens our wallets, but also perks up our appetites for lunch. We decide to head downtown to the waterfront, and eat at The Seafood House, a quaint restaurant with a seafaring tradition that was once frequented by the likes of Herman Melville and Peter Benchley (though they weren't necessarily there together). We ask the waitress what kind of sandwiches they have.

"Soft-shelled crab and shrimp salad."

We smile and explain our dietary restrictions, after which she shrugs and points blankly at the menu. After a little more explanation she brings us French fries and coleslaw, hold the mayonnaise. The cabbage and potatoes remind us of Ireland, and the famous famine of the mid-19^th Century. How colorful!

We walk off our delicious lunch by spending the afternoon hours in Big City's famous Linkletter-Carney Museum of the Arts. The collection is world-class, but looking at the many still lifes (lives?) leaves us hungry for dinner. After a brief stop at our hotel to freshen up, we take a cab uptown to Palms Up, the famous steakhouse where Herman Melville also used to eat. According to the sign, Palms Up prides itself on serving "huge cuts of aged, prime beef in an atmosphere of quiet sophistication." The big leather chairs are a bit heavy for one person to move, but after we get seated and our eyes adjust to the hickory smoke in the air, we enjoy the wood paneling and the jovial conviviality of all the fat people at the neighboring tables.

We know our vegan diets will be a welcomed challenge for the fine chefs at Palms Up, and we rely on our knowledgeable waiter Edward to guide us through a delicious vegan meal.

"What did you say you people are?" Edward asks.

After a little more explanation Edward shrugs and points blankly at the menu. Still more explanation and a discreet $20 bill (we find out later this is why they named the restaurant Palms Up) put Edward on the right track. He suggests the famous Palms Up salad (hold the bacon bits, hold the cheese, hold the hard-boiled egg, hold the dressing) and the famous Palms Up "twice-baked" stuffed potato (hold the butter, hold the bacon bits, hold the sour cream, hold the "stuffing", no need to bake twice). The dinner is very filling, and when it's time for dessert we're glad that the famous Palms Up cheesecake, when modified to be vegan (hold all ingredients), is remarkably light and airy.

Back at our hotel we're happy and tired after the first day of our visit. We've made wonderful choices, and we've had the kind of rare dining experiences one can only get in world-class establishments. We can't wait to see what culinary delights are in store for us tomorrow, as we explore more of the fine restaurants of Big City!