I've only read the first sentence but just want to point out that the Impossible Burger isn't available in large parts of the world. I really want to try it but have never. I regularly eat the Beyond Burger but we also had to wait years before we got the chance.
On Vegan Mob's fries: hah! That was exactly my experience at the vegan parrilla in Buenos Aires to which I went several times in 2019 (https://www.happycow.net/reviews/la-reverde-parrillita-vegana-buenos-aires-92712). It's not just that their fake meat is remarkable, or that their fries are subpar: their fries simply aren't realistic. Real, yes, but not realistic.
Almost every healthy diet involves eating real food and avoiding processed, highly palatable slop. This drive towards replacing the only "real" food that a significant proportion of the populace eat (i.e. meat) with this artificially created stuff is extremely misguided when considering the health of the population as a whole.
> The French fries almost, but not quite, managed to taste like real French fries. I have no explanation for this. I have no reason to think that vegan restaurants make fake French fries. I don't even know what making fake vegan French fries would mean. Yet they were still slightly off.
I know McDonald's fries are cooked in animal fat, which contributes to the flavor. It wouldn't surprise me if this is actually pretty common, and potatoes fried in other fats just taste differently.
If you're in the midwest, the Culver's chain has a veggie burger that is extremely solid. It does not try to directly simulate meat, exactly, as it has visible pieces of various vegetables in it - instead it proudly occupies the liminal space between veggies and meat and tastes vaguely fresh and meaty at the same time.
Taste aside, ancient and modern nutritionists agree that highly processed food is vastly inferior nutritionally to minimally processed food and often are determined years later to have a deleterious effect on human health.
One day, maybe not in lifetime but still in the pipeline, eating regular meat is going to be a class marker for the upper rungs of society as a back-to-nature kind of thing; plebeians may eat processed soy, but in this household we only eat authentic, knife-carved meat imported from the cattle ranches of Mongolia and cooked by an in-house specialist in meat preparation.
I’ll be dead then, but I’ll clue in my hypothetical grandkids so they can see it coming.
Scott, I know this isn't a restaurant, but you should review the new Brave Robot ice cream. It's vegan but made from lab-grown whey instead of almond/soy milk. And it's now available in the bay area at Sprouts. I think it's surprisingly good, and it's better than my previous favorite vegan ice cream (Ben and Jerry's Chocolate Fudge Brownie).
Generalizing beyond the Bay Area: what are some more widespread chains with vegetarian meat selections besides a generic Impossible/Beyond burger, and how well do they produce said dishes?
FWIW, my take on vegan/vegetarian food is... there are so many good foods without meat! Like, give me a bunch of chickpeas cooked in sauce (chana masala) instead of chickpeas turned into cubes pretending to be chicken (or whatever). And so I like the salads at The Butcher's Son, and I like their cookies, and the bacon macaroni salad is pretty good, but the sandwiches are all unsettlingly fake.
It maybe helps that I've eaten many, many grain-heavy meals over the course of my life (like, just pasta and sauce, which is vegan, or just bread and butter/ghee, which is vegeterian), and don't really miss meat when I go off it, and so I don't have a sense of "where's the beef?" after I get a bunch of protein from a non-meat source.
Since you mentioned cults, a significant number of Chinese vegetarian restaurants are operated by this religious group. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ching_Hai
I've seen them branded as "Nature Vegetarian" before, so it's possibly related. Their most popular chain is called "Loving Hut".
I’d love to hear from any athletic, vegetarian-ish folks who consume 1.5-2g of protein per kg of body weight. How do you get to that level of protein consumption without meat?
In case you're interested in better-tasting items at Souley Vegan, I would highly recommend the crispy tofu burger. It's not mock meat, but it's excellent!
Golden Lotus is run by followers of the Supreme Master Ching Hai (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ching_Hai), most of whose followers' restaurants are called Loving Hut. Oddly enough, despite all displaying the Supreme Master's artwork (and in some cases her books, videos, or TV station), they don't have a particularly standardized menu and the dishes vary hugely from location to location.
I'm lacto-vegetarian now and I honestly don't find myself craving these fake meats. In my limited experience, they manage the texture of meat without the flavour, and are just kind of weird and wobbly. I guess I've never been the biggest fan of meat, raw meat disgusts me so I'm probably vegetarian for mostly aesthetic reasons, I'm way less picky when other people are cooking. Meat substitutes are also way too processed for me to be 100% on board, as other people have noted, but you could say the same for most meat-based burgers and sausages (sign of the times that I have to specify "meat" there).
I'm very much onboard with the "cover it in sauce and you won't notice" approach to vegan cooking, I love making lentil curries and bean chillies, although since I'm not actually vegan I get to cover it with cheese if I want to. I've tried most of the plant based milks and they're all OK, but for me the hurdle to clear is a plant based cheese that a non-vegan would actually find appealing, and I'm not sure where to buy that. Cheese is probably my main source of protein at this point, giving that up will be difficult.
If you’re ever jn Atlanta, there’s a ridiculously good vegan Asian fusion place there called Herban Fix. I’m not vegan and the meals there are among the best I’ve ever had.
Love Ike's, never heard of Crave. Maybe because I've never lived in the core bay area. I mostly have Ike's when I go home to Santa Cruz. Haven't been in a few months. Regardless, my impression was that Ike's had quite a few halal options (halal chicken, I believe) and I wonder if this is something they copied from Crave in their turn.
Having never been to Crave, I feel like Ike's has to win in any kind of fake-meat competition because their sauces are so amazing (with the exception of the marinara, which generic). I highly recommend anything with their yellow barbecue sauce and/or any of their habanero offerings. I usually get the habanero on the side though. Flamey! (by white guy standards).
The Butcher's Son bacon isn't made in house. I'm not sure who does make it, but they may tell you. It definitely contains konjac, and might be made by Be Leaf. My sister thought it was made by Loving Hut, which is a cult that runs a restaurant chain with locations in SF and the South Bay. You can byu it from Butcher's Son at about the same price as upscale pig bacon.
There's a company doing a range of real meat "IRISH BEEF PRODUCTS, MADE WITH 100% NATURAL INGREDIENTS" called The Farmer's Daughter (real daughter of real farmer). Maybe we should try getting them together with The Butcher's Son and see what shakes out? https://www.tfdaughter.com/ourstory
"The French fries almost, but not quite, managed to taste like real French fries. I have no explanation for this. I have no reason to think that vegan restaurants make fake French fries. I don't even know what making fake vegan French fries would mean. Yet they were still slightly off."
It could be whatever oil they are frying them in, and/or how they do it. Also the variety of spud used. Or maybe they just do really bad chips, not everywhere can do them right.
Differences between Irish chipper chips and British chippy chips: Seemingly, Irish chips are fried in vegetable oil because that is what the Italian immigrants who ran the first chippers used. British are divided between frying in lard (pig fat) or beef dripping as traditional fats, though vegetable oils are more common nowadays.
"The wasabi mayo was an interesting taste, and the vegan chicken was somewhere between inoffensive and actually good. Crave's Goku impressed me less - either the BBQ sauce wasn't quite as good at distracting from the fake meat as the wasabi mayo, or their fake meat was lower quality."
I'd definitely put it down to the wasabi mayo, wasabi gives everything a zing (and will clear out your blocked sinuses to boot).
"The sweet orange and spicy ginger dishes somehow managed to be a fully generic food, a sort of everything and nothing all at once. It came in little rectangles and tasted like the abstract concept of eating something."
Would that be tofu? Seems to me if you're going to do vegan Chinese food, tofu instead of some other fake meat is your go-to choice because of the long experience of cooking with it. The Chinese/Asian takeaways around here that offer vegetarian/vegan options offer tofu versions of the beef/chicken/pork/duck dishes.
I just want to express my somewhat unpopular opinion that it's stupid to give meat-based names to vegetarian/vegan alternatives. You had no choice, I know, they do that and you're reviewing them.
But calling seitan blobs "Vegan meatballs", "Vegetarian chicken nuggets" or "Louisiana Hot Links" is just confusing and detrimental to people that want to order real meat AND people that don't want to order real meat. It's that kind of "universal stupid".
Calling them all plant-based is a disservice to fungi.
In the UK, Greggs vegan sausage rolls have been doing very well. The real casualty of veganification is the pastry. Someone needs to figure out a plant-based glaze to make it nice and crispy.
The Linda McCartney vegetarian [beef and onion] pies are unreasonably tasty, though they do tend to mildly explode after 25 minutes in the oven.
I've never tried vegan black pud or haggis but I presume that the laws of supply and demand mean that demand for by-products like pluck has less of an impact on the quantity supplied than demand for actual meat. Is this correct?
Would be interested to read a literature review from you on the safety and potential benefits of vegetable-based meat substitutes.
Beyond giving beyond meat a try once, to see how it tastes (enjoyed it), I've been avoiding all such products because:
1. Almost always based on leghemoglobin or some other equally reactive protein that is contained in amounts 100...0x higher than what I'd ingest eating plants
2. A fear of "animal product substitutes" in general, based on my reading of when that was last tired en mass (i.e. the 60s-2000s resulting in the addition of massive amount of weird trans fats to replace milk-based product)
3. Unsure of how to judge unknown, unknowns
Though the whole story has many other interesting chapters and the issue has become somewhat partisan, in that of so weird way nutrition-based issues seem to become partisan.
I would really like to know what brands/products are used in these restaurants. There are a ton of options for e.g. vegan chicken, and they are definitely not all equal. (I get similarly irritated at people/companies that treat Impossible and Beyond as fungible. They are not.)
(Also, last year I saved over $1K just by reducing takeout to once/week, and I'd like to continue that trend. Buying these meat substitutes to cook at home is therefore more feasible.)
Just as a counter to the idea this is an upper class blue state phenomenon, I recently visited another Bay Area (Tampa/St Petersburg) and that area has great vegan restaurants and bakeries, some doing incredible vegan versions of southern soul food. Wasn’t expecting that in Florida.
The Crave and Ike's thin reminds me of how there's these two falafel shops across the street from each other in Jerusalem called "the original Abu Shukri" and "The truly original Abu Shukri". Apparently they can't decide which one of them was there first, though I'm inclined to give it to the second one because he's extra insistent on it.
In Sichuan cuisine, there's a unique dish, called ji douhua, which is fake tofu made of chicken. It's sort of a joke, making an apparently plain dish out of fancy ingredients. Being a meat-eater who feels bad about it but hates tofu, I think ji douhua is a dish I would never eat, combining elements I dislike about vegetarian and non-vegetarian options.
I am happy to eat the juicy flesh of cow, but my wife is less so, and we've been eating Beyond Burgers a couple of meals a week for the last few months and it's been a good experience. Our grocery store sells them at reasonable prices, I put them on a frying pan for three minutes per side, use sriacha mayo, ketchup, mustard, bun, and the whole thing is perhaps not "the best burger I've ever had," but it tastes, to this happy-eater-of-the-flesh-of-cows, like a pretty good burger. And it's easy. And cheap. And it dirties only one non-stick frying pan.
I'm so not the target market for this -- I'm a lifelong vegetarian and as such have no particular desire for reproductions of meat dishes I've never had -- but your writing, as always, is brilliant. I've had a crappy week, and this made me laugh more than once. Thanks, Scott.
The Golden Lotus monks (and eponymous addictive entheogen) are a faction in the D&D adventure Qelong, Ken Hite’s rather orientalist but good hexcrawl that channels Apocalypse Now. So the name is definitely some kind of attractor.
If you’re in the Boston area (or elsewhere? dunno their range) I haven’t had anything bad from Clover yet, and particularly recommend their vegetarian meatball sub.
A few years ago I ate an Impossible Cheeseburger at a kosher sandwich shop in Brookline, MA. I bit into it and it wasn't indistinguishable from meat. But I did have a panic attack halfway through wondering how I'd ended up breaking kashrut even though I knew intellectually I wasn't, so clearly it wasn't half bad at replacing meat!
> I wondered why "Golden Lotus" sounded so familiar, until I remembered that was what I called the creepy enlightenment speedrunning cult in my story Samsara. Whatever, probably this is a common name for Asian-associated things. Just a coincidence, right?
It seems worth pointing out that there is a Chinese Buddhist deity named 金花娘娘 ("Lady Gold Flower") with responsibility over maternal affairs such as getting pregnant and childbirth. The name does not specify a lotus, but we can assume a Buddhist divine flower; it seems like a fair assumption to make. https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%87%91%E8%8A%B1%E5%A8%98%E5%A8%98
I see there is also a deity named 金华夫人 ("Lady Gold Glory", but 华 huá "glory" and 花 huā "flower" are pronounced similarly), with a dictionary entry in 汉语大词典 that specifies nothing other than "name of a deity", but, crucially, is cross-referenced under 金花, suggesting some confusion. Unlike 金花娘娘, 金华夫人 does not appear to have a wikipedia page. I have no idea whether these are the same deity or not.
This all tends to support the theory that "golden lotus" might work as a generic Asian term.
My last experience with fake meat was a Black Bean Burger from a NC State University dining hall circa the 2011-12 school year. I liked it, but I wouldn't voluntarily give up beef burgers intirely for it.
I kind of want to give Impossible a try if just out of curiosity, But following the link below, the first price tag I heard confirmed my suspicions that fake meat is more expensive than real meat and I can't even afford real meat in any worthwhile quantity(I'm surviving mainly on a diet of ramen, rice, and canned beans(Black, pinto, kidney, and red beans being regulars to the rotation, beans in chili sauce is common too, not a fan of chickpeas(though I can manage if they're mashed up before adding them to a bowl of ramen or rice, didn't care for Tofu the one time I tried it and have never tried unprocess soy beans, I sometimes add a can of peas, corn, or mixed veggies or get black-eyed peas when Wal-Mart doesn't have enough beans in stock).
Does Impossible offset any of the other reasons for my involuntary vegetarianism? In other words, does it have the same storage constraints that real meat has a short shelf life unless frozen or highly processed? If Impossible requires freezing, can it go straight from freezer to a meal? Is impossible any more convenient to prepare a meal from than meat? The trailer I'm renting has a stove, but it's gas and no one here can afford fuel for it, and even if I had access to a working stove or hot plate, I'm not fully comfortable using either appliance... I have an electric kettle, and when I make ramen with beans, I just dump the beans and any veggies or cheese in with the blocks of hard noodles, pour boiling water over and cover it for about 30 minutes for everything to cook and access broth to soak in, for rice and beans, I cook rice in a mini-rice cooker and mix in the beans after dumping the rice into a bowl, letting the heat from the rice cook the beans.
We have a microwave, but it's the kind with a completely flat control panel, so if I don't want to blindly press buttons until it starts and then count seconds hoping I started it for long enough, I need to get help from a sighted housemate, and they'r'e usually at work when I make my supper.
That said, reading this so made me wish I could afford a whopper, double quarter pounder with cheese, footlong chicken teriyaki or spicy italian, 12-pack of soft tacos, or a large the Works... sadly, pretty much all of those are out of my budget and of the hinted fast food chains, Papa John's is the only one that delivers(and even if I could afford it, it's probably too late since they won't deliver to the trailer park I live in after sunset).
I wonder if there is an opening for some edgy restaurant that serves its customers vegetarian versions of endangered species etc. Or even breaks the ultimate taboo with vegetarian long pig!
Can someone tell me how you get a vegetarian drumstick? Is it just like plant-based product smooshed around a stick in a drumstick shape, or what? Also, apropos of nothing, I did have alligator once and didn't like it - it was like very chewy, tough chicken.
Amy’s Drive-Thru up in the Marin hinterlands does a pretty good vegan approximation of fast food burgers (and shakes!) — if you ever find yourself in Corte Madera, you should check it out.
Bacon doesn't seem all that hard to imitate. Soy sauce, liquid smoke, tomato paste, and frying combine to make a very bacon-y flavor. Even just putting soy sauce on tempeh and shallow-frying it is enough to satisfy my desire for bacon. (It doesn't *really* taste like bacon, but it satisfies the urge.)
Probably a bit far for you to visit regularly (we have problems ourselves since we are so far south and its out of our Door Dash range) But, if you want to try somewhere amazing, try Garden Fresh Chinese in Mountain View. My GF is sometimes vegan and I typically cringe at vegan restaurant spice selection. (I immediately feel a severe aversion just walking into a vegan place and smelling their spice profile). That said, Garden Fresh is one of the few vegan places I would happily visit anytime and its definitely the only vegan place I would choose over a non-vegan option. Its just a hole in the wall in a strip mall, yet its faux shrimp are better than the real thing. I cannot really describe them except to say, these are the platonic ideal of shrimp. I would be convinced they were feeding me real shrimp except real shrimp are never ever this perfect. Im pretty sure they make them the normal way vegan shrimp is made but, I don't know how theirs is so much better. Their vegan Sweet and Sour Pork and Beef with Broccoli are great too. I think I slightly prefer them to the standard carnivore versions but its not food of the gods like the shrimp.
There's a place in Boulder called the Bumbling Bee that has really, really tasty vegan junk food. I love milkshakes, they are probably the single thing I miss most about being vegetarian, and they nail milkshakes (and malts!) and all sorts of other good stuff
Speaking as a lifelong vegetarian, I think `fake meat' (including the Impossible variety) is gross and disgusting, and `vegetarian' food should be embraced for what it is instead of shoehorned into some facsimile of meat. Accordingly, I never order the `fake meat' options (although I did try an Impossible burger once, to see what it was about) so...
I very much enjoyed the tone of these reviews, but sadly there doesn't seem to be anything to motivate me to try fake meat. Seems like normal nutrient poor, calorie-rich American restaurant food, just more processed.
Love the post. If you're looking for more hu ger options specifically, I recommend the veggie burger at Gott's refresher. They also have Impossible Burger, but I find I like veggie burgers more, in general as well as here specifically, because restaurants add more of their own style. The flavor is highly comparable. I think there's one in SF (I go to the one here in Napa)
They have top notch vegan steaks. People have made everything from chicken fried steak to beef tips and rice. I've eaten them as is with veggies on the side just as you would a real beef steak and I gotta say it's the best I've ever had.
"Bay Area" but they're all in the Oakland-Berkeley area. That may be great for Scott, but it's a little misleading for those of us from, for instance, Silicon Valley. At least Ike's is a local chain which exists down here too.
"By this point you’ve probably tried Impossible Burgers"
To me this reads exactly like "By this point you've probably had your scrotum pierced" --- that is, I know that there are people who get their scrota pierced, but there is absolutely no chance I would ever do that, much less "probably" do it. :-)
Note that I'm not criticizing people who get their scrota pierced. Doesn't pick my pocket, doesn't break my leg. Enjoy!
I'm just saying that it's not something I would ever do.
If you’re in the Philly area, I recommend Plnt Burger. It’s at the Whole Foods in Wynnewood, PA. We’re not vegetarian and were very impressed. The burger was great, the mushroom-based “chicken” sandwich was remarkably convincing, and the fries were the best I’ve had in years. Great sauces, too. And they make excellent ice cream, with real chocolate.
They’re getting it right in that it’s absolutely not health food; their frying game is on point. Everything is amazingly crispy and tastes like a treat, the way a burger and fries should. They just removed the animals and turned everything else we love about this kind of food up to 11, which is a strategy I admire.
The wager applies to people who care about being moral. If the vegans are right about animal consumption being a moral atrocity, then non-vegans are committing a grievous error. If the vegans are wrong ... what potential harm is there in going vegan anyway? Does anyone *really* believe there is a risk of veganism turning out to be a moral atrocity?
I've eaten an Impossible Burger twice, once at Burger King and once at a local gastropub. Both times, I thought it tasted very much like a hamburger - but a somewhat dry, slightly overcooked hamburger than entirely lacked the mouth-watering richness one hopes for from red meat. In other words, it might be an adequate substitute for a fast food burger, but not for a really good burger. Is that as good as it gets, or did I just get a couple of unskillfully prepared ones?
I wrote a review of the nutritional properties of Impossible Burgers a few years back: https://conceptspacecartography.com/a-nutrition-focused-review-of-the-impossible-burger/ . I believe they've made some recipe tweaks, but I still believe the conclusion (that Impossible beef and animal beef are on par, nutritionally). They've started showing up in grocery stores (including the one I shop at, Berkeley Bowl on Oregon St). I'm still very much not a vegetarian, but I'm eating a couple per week, displacing what would otherwise have been beef, and other than the price tag I don't see any downsides to this.
I went to Butcher's Son this weekend to see if they actually "solved bacon", and they did not. I'm guessing Scott hasn't actually had bacon in a while, because it was obviously not bacon.
That said, it was far better than I expected. I was expecting something along the lines of Bac'n Bits, which is a crunchy, salty, smoky product, but this was actually much "meatier" in texture. I personally prefer my bacon to be on the more rare side, so this was a welcome change from any fake bacon I've tasted before. That said, the texture was good, but it really wasn't the texture of bacon. It was more similar to something like pastrami. Well cooked bacon will have several different textures to it, the chewy meat parts, to the caramelized, melt in your mouth fatty parts, and the soft juicy fatty parts. This was just kind of a uniform texture. They did try to include some fake fatty parts, but the texture wasn't much different from the "meat" parts.
Taste wise it was good, but not great. It reminded me of turkey bacon, where you get the saltiness and smokiness, but it lacks the depth of flavor. There was also a sweet aftertaste that was a little off-putting, but that was only noticeable when you ate the bacon straight. In the sandwich I didn't notice it.
Overall, I would say that fake bacon definitely is not "solved". It was like 75% of the way to turkey bacon, which is like 25% of the way to real bacon.
The BLAT also has a fake fried chicken tender on it, and that tasted nothing like chicken the texture was nowhere near right, but it tasted pretty good as a completely new food item. There's just no reason to claim it was anything near chicken. The vegan mayonnaise was worthless, runny and flavorless. The tomatoes were also garbage, but I'm not going to hold that against them because I'm the one ordering a BLT in February.
The sandwich overall was pretty tasty though, and I would get it again if I were near the restaurant, but I wouldn't go out of my way for it, and $15 was a pretty high price for what you got.
I ignored this post for a while because I'm East Coast, Not a Vegan, Strict Kosher & figured not for me. Had 4 hours of driving last night for a COVID Shot (Yay NJ) & listened to the podcast version. I laughed the whole time. This was great More Please!!
If you're ever in the badlands of the bay aka San Jose, there's some really phenomenal vegetarian Vietnamese places here. I especially like the tofu maker shops here that serve triple duty as retail, deli, and restaurant.
I'm not vegetarian, but there a tofu shop near me called Dong Phuong Tofu. They have the best bowl of vegetarian Bun Bo Hue noodle soup I've ever had. I would actually go there just to order that, even being non-veg. I've had the actual seafood and beef based Bun Bo Hue plenty of times and I'd still say this vegetarian version compares favorably to any of those. Fair warning it's 1000% a hole in the wall dive, you'll probably have bad, but efficient service if you don't speak Vietnamese, and it's cash only.
I've only read the first sentence but just want to point out that the Impossible Burger isn't available in large parts of the world. I really want to try it but have never. I regularly eat the Beyond Burger but we also had to wait years before we got the chance.
On Vegan Mob's fries: hah! That was exactly my experience at the vegan parrilla in Buenos Aires to which I went several times in 2019 (https://www.happycow.net/reviews/la-reverde-parrillita-vegana-buenos-aires-92712). It's not just that their fake meat is remarkable, or that their fries are subpar: their fries simply aren't realistic. Real, yes, but not realistic.
The Butcher's Son often (but not always) does delivery on DoorDash, including stuff from the market.
Drive down and try the burgers and fried chicken at Indigo Burger in Newark! They're amazingly good. 5/5 for me, and their seasoned fries are 6/5.
Almost every healthy diet involves eating real food and avoiding processed, highly palatable slop. This drive towards replacing the only "real" food that a significant proportion of the populace eat (i.e. meat) with this artificially created stuff is extremely misguided when considering the health of the population as a whole.
> The French fries almost, but not quite, managed to taste like real French fries. I have no explanation for this. I have no reason to think that vegan restaurants make fake French fries. I don't even know what making fake vegan French fries would mean. Yet they were still slightly off.
I know McDonald's fries are cooked in animal fat, which contributes to the flavor. It wouldn't surprise me if this is actually pretty common, and potatoes fried in other fats just taste differently.
If you're in the midwest, the Culver's chain has a veggie burger that is extremely solid. It does not try to directly simulate meat, exactly, as it has visible pieces of various vegetables in it - instead it proudly occupies the liminal space between veggies and meat and tastes vaguely fresh and meaty at the same time.
Taste aside, ancient and modern nutritionists agree that highly processed food is vastly inferior nutritionally to minimally processed food and often are determined years later to have a deleterious effect on human health.
One day, maybe not in lifetime but still in the pipeline, eating regular meat is going to be a class marker for the upper rungs of society as a back-to-nature kind of thing; plebeians may eat processed soy, but in this household we only eat authentic, knife-carved meat imported from the cattle ranches of Mongolia and cooked by an in-house specialist in meat preparation.
I’ll be dead then, but I’ll clue in my hypothetical grandkids so they can see it coming.
Scott, I know this isn't a restaurant, but you should review the new Brave Robot ice cream. It's vegan but made from lab-grown whey instead of almond/soy milk. And it's now available in the bay area at Sprouts. I think it's surprisingly good, and it's better than my previous favorite vegan ice cream (Ben and Jerry's Chocolate Fudge Brownie).
Generalizing beyond the Bay Area: what are some more widespread chains with vegetarian meat selections besides a generic Impossible/Beyond burger, and how well do they produce said dishes?
FWIW, my take on vegan/vegetarian food is... there are so many good foods without meat! Like, give me a bunch of chickpeas cooked in sauce (chana masala) instead of chickpeas turned into cubes pretending to be chicken (or whatever). And so I like the salads at The Butcher's Son, and I like their cookies, and the bacon macaroni salad is pretty good, but the sandwiches are all unsettlingly fake.
It maybe helps that I've eaten many, many grain-heavy meals over the course of my life (like, just pasta and sauce, which is vegan, or just bread and butter/ghee, which is vegeterian), and don't really miss meat when I go off it, and so I don't have a sense of "where's the beef?" after I get a bunch of protein from a non-meat source.
I was hoping you'd include the Impossible Whopper from Burger King. Since you didn't, here's my review:
Tastes like a Whopper.
>At least they’re not a front for the mob - I assume real mob fronts try to avoid including “mob” in the name.
That's exactly what the mob would like you to assume, is it not?
Great read (as a fellow mostly-vegetarian).
Since you mentioned cults, a significant number of Chinese vegetarian restaurants are operated by this religious group. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ching_Hai
I've seen them branded as "Nature Vegetarian" before, so it's possibly related. Their most popular chain is called "Loving Hut".
It's an interesting and tasty rabbit-hole.
I’d love to hear from any athletic, vegetarian-ish folks who consume 1.5-2g of protein per kg of body weight. How do you get to that level of protein consumption without meat?
In case you're interested in better-tasting items at Souley Vegan, I would highly recommend the crispy tofu burger. It's not mock meat, but it's excellent!
Golden Lotus is run by followers of the Supreme Master Ching Hai (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ching_Hai), most of whose followers' restaurants are called Loving Hut. Oddly enough, despite all displaying the Supreme Master's artwork (and in some cases her books, videos, or TV station), they don't have a particularly standardized menu and the dishes vary hugely from location to location.
I feel like this is some ironic comeuppance for me saying this blog was too focused on weird bay area specific issues in the past
I'm lacto-vegetarian now and I honestly don't find myself craving these fake meats. In my limited experience, they manage the texture of meat without the flavour, and are just kind of weird and wobbly. I guess I've never been the biggest fan of meat, raw meat disgusts me so I'm probably vegetarian for mostly aesthetic reasons, I'm way less picky when other people are cooking. Meat substitutes are also way too processed for me to be 100% on board, as other people have noted, but you could say the same for most meat-based burgers and sausages (sign of the times that I have to specify "meat" there).
I'm very much onboard with the "cover it in sauce and you won't notice" approach to vegan cooking, I love making lentil curries and bean chillies, although since I'm not actually vegan I get to cover it with cheese if I want to. I've tried most of the plant based milks and they're all OK, but for me the hurdle to clear is a plant based cheese that a non-vegan would actually find appealing, and I'm not sure where to buy that. Cheese is probably my main source of protein at this point, giving that up will be difficult.
I've eaten alligator, it was very good, though what was notable was the texture (tender and juicy) more than the flavor.
On the other hand, rattlesnake was very disappointing. Mostly breading with almost no rattlesnake. Perhaps vegetarian rattlesnake would be better.
As a general thing, I eat weird meat when possible on the assumption that it's less likely to have been bred into flavorlessness.
If you’re ever jn Atlanta, there’s a ridiculously good vegan Asian fusion place there called Herban Fix. I’m not vegan and the meals there are among the best I’ve ever had.
I haven't had much off of the veggie/vegan menu, but Ike's is good.
Real alligator also tastes kind of weird, so it may very well have been an authentic replication!
Also, no stuffing on the Turkey sub? For shame.
Love Ike's, never heard of Crave. Maybe because I've never lived in the core bay area. I mostly have Ike's when I go home to Santa Cruz. Haven't been in a few months. Regardless, my impression was that Ike's had quite a few halal options (halal chicken, I believe) and I wonder if this is something they copied from Crave in their turn.
Having never been to Crave, I feel like Ike's has to win in any kind of fake-meat competition because their sauces are so amazing (with the exception of the marinara, which generic). I highly recommend anything with their yellow barbecue sauce and/or any of their habanero offerings. I usually get the habanero on the side though. Flamey! (by white guy standards).
My favorite place is Shizen, a vegan sushi spot in the SF Mission which is far better than the vast majority of fish-based sushi restaurants.
The Butcher's Son bacon isn't made in house. I'm not sure who does make it, but they may tell you. It definitely contains konjac, and might be made by Be Leaf. My sister thought it was made by Loving Hut, which is a cult that runs a restaurant chain with locations in SF and the South Bay. You can byu it from Butcher's Son at about the same price as upscale pig bacon.
> It came in little rectangles and tasted like the abstract concept of eating something
a very rationalist food then!
There's a company doing a range of real meat "IRISH BEEF PRODUCTS, MADE WITH 100% NATURAL INGREDIENTS" called The Farmer's Daughter (real daughter of real farmer). Maybe we should try getting them together with The Butcher's Son and see what shakes out? https://www.tfdaughter.com/ourstory
"The French fries almost, but not quite, managed to taste like real French fries. I have no explanation for this. I have no reason to think that vegan restaurants make fake French fries. I don't even know what making fake vegan French fries would mean. Yet they were still slightly off."
It could be whatever oil they are frying them in, and/or how they do it. Also the variety of spud used. Or maybe they just do really bad chips, not everywhere can do them right.
Differences between Irish chipper chips and British chippy chips: Seemingly, Irish chips are fried in vegetable oil because that is what the Italian immigrants who ran the first chippers used. British are divided between frying in lard (pig fat) or beef dripping as traditional fats, though vegetable oils are more common nowadays.
"The wasabi mayo was an interesting taste, and the vegan chicken was somewhere between inoffensive and actually good. Crave's Goku impressed me less - either the BBQ sauce wasn't quite as good at distracting from the fake meat as the wasabi mayo, or their fake meat was lower quality."
I'd definitely put it down to the wasabi mayo, wasabi gives everything a zing (and will clear out your blocked sinuses to boot).
"The sweet orange and spicy ginger dishes somehow managed to be a fully generic food, a sort of everything and nothing all at once. It came in little rectangles and tasted like the abstract concept of eating something."
Would that be tofu? Seems to me if you're going to do vegan Chinese food, tofu instead of some other fake meat is your go-to choice because of the long experience of cooking with it. The Chinese/Asian takeaways around here that offer vegetarian/vegan options offer tofu versions of the beef/chicken/pork/duck dishes.
I just want to express my somewhat unpopular opinion that it's stupid to give meat-based names to vegetarian/vegan alternatives. You had no choice, I know, they do that and you're reviewing them.
But calling seitan blobs "Vegan meatballs", "Vegetarian chicken nuggets" or "Louisiana Hot Links" is just confusing and detrimental to people that want to order real meat AND people that don't want to order real meat. It's that kind of "universal stupid".
Calling them all plant-based is a disservice to fungi.
In the UK, Greggs vegan sausage rolls have been doing very well. The real casualty of veganification is the pastry. Someone needs to figure out a plant-based glaze to make it nice and crispy.
The Linda McCartney vegetarian [beef and onion] pies are unreasonably tasty, though they do tend to mildly explode after 25 minutes in the oven.
I've never tried vegan black pud or haggis but I presume that the laws of supply and demand mean that demand for by-products like pluck has less of an impact on the quantity supplied than demand for actual meat. Is this correct?
You probably shouldn't go around calling places a front for the mob unless you want to get sued for libel.
I found this extremely amusing even though I have no interest in visiting hell on earth, or the Bay Area.
Note that Dutch crunch is called tiger bread in The Netherlands, which is a much better name.
Would be interested to read a literature review from you on the safety and potential benefits of vegetable-based meat substitutes.
Beyond giving beyond meat a try once, to see how it tastes (enjoyed it), I've been avoiding all such products because:
1. Almost always based on leghemoglobin or some other equally reactive protein that is contained in amounts 100...0x higher than what I'd ingest eating plants
2. A fear of "animal product substitutes" in general, based on my reading of when that was last tired en mass (i.e. the 60s-2000s resulting in the addition of massive amount of weird trans fats to replace milk-based product)
3. Unsure of how to judge unknown, unknowns
Though the whole story has many other interesting chapters and the issue has become somewhat partisan, in that of so weird way nutrition-based issues seem to become partisan.
I would really like to know what brands/products are used in these restaurants. There are a ton of options for e.g. vegan chicken, and they are definitely not all equal. (I get similarly irritated at people/companies that treat Impossible and Beyond as fungible. They are not.)
(Also, last year I saved over $1K just by reducing takeout to once/week, and I'd like to continue that trend. Buying these meat substitutes to cook at home is therefore more feasible.)
Just as a counter to the idea this is an upper class blue state phenomenon, I recently visited another Bay Area (Tampa/St Petersburg) and that area has great vegan restaurants and bakeries, some doing incredible vegan versions of southern soul food. Wasn’t expecting that in Florida.
The Crave and Ike's thin reminds me of how there's these two falafel shops across the street from each other in Jerusalem called "the original Abu Shukri" and "The truly original Abu Shukri". Apparently they can't decide which one of them was there first, though I'm inclined to give it to the second one because he's extra insistent on it.
In Sichuan cuisine, there's a unique dish, called ji douhua, which is fake tofu made of chicken. It's sort of a joke, making an apparently plain dish out of fancy ingredients. Being a meat-eater who feels bad about it but hates tofu, I think ji douhua is a dish I would never eat, combining elements I dislike about vegetarian and non-vegetarian options.
I like Thai food and I think Scott underrates Summer Summer Thai Eatery. It's *very* good, and is my current favorite restaurant.
I am happy to eat the juicy flesh of cow, but my wife is less so, and we've been eating Beyond Burgers a couple of meals a week for the last few months and it's been a good experience. Our grocery store sells them at reasonable prices, I put them on a frying pan for three minutes per side, use sriacha mayo, ketchup, mustard, bun, and the whole thing is perhaps not "the best burger I've ever had," but it tastes, to this happy-eater-of-the-flesh-of-cows, like a pretty good burger. And it's easy. And cheap. And it dirties only one non-stick frying pan.
I'm so not the target market for this -- I'm a lifelong vegetarian and as such have no particular desire for reproductions of meat dishes I've never had -- but your writing, as always, is brilliant. I've had a crappy week, and this made me laugh more than once. Thanks, Scott.
The Golden Lotus monks (and eponymous addictive entheogen) are a faction in the D&D adventure Qelong, Ken Hite’s rather orientalist but good hexcrawl that channels Apocalypse Now. So the name is definitely some kind of attractor.
If you’re in the Boston area (or elsewhere? dunno their range) I haven’t had anything bad from Clover yet, and particularly recommend their vegetarian meatball sub.
A few years ago I ate an Impossible Cheeseburger at a kosher sandwich shop in Brookline, MA. I bit into it and it wasn't indistinguishable from meat. But I did have a panic attack halfway through wondering how I'd ended up breaking kashrut even though I knew intellectually I wasn't, so clearly it wasn't half bad at replacing meat!
> I wondered why "Golden Lotus" sounded so familiar, until I remembered that was what I called the creepy enlightenment speedrunning cult in my story Samsara. Whatever, probably this is a common name for Asian-associated things. Just a coincidence, right?
It seems worth pointing out that there is a Chinese Buddhist deity named 金花娘娘 ("Lady Gold Flower") with responsibility over maternal affairs such as getting pregnant and childbirth. The name does not specify a lotus, but we can assume a Buddhist divine flower; it seems like a fair assumption to make. https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%87%91%E8%8A%B1%E5%A8%98%E5%A8%98
I see there is also a deity named 金华夫人 ("Lady Gold Glory", but 华 huá "glory" and 花 huā "flower" are pronounced similarly), with a dictionary entry in 汉语大词典 that specifies nothing other than "name of a deity", but, crucially, is cross-referenced under 金花, suggesting some confusion. Unlike 金花娘娘, 金华夫人 does not appear to have a wikipedia page. I have no idea whether these are the same deity or not.
This all tends to support the theory that "golden lotus" might work as a generic Asian term.
My last experience with fake meat was a Black Bean Burger from a NC State University dining hall circa the 2011-12 school year. I liked it, but I wouldn't voluntarily give up beef burgers intirely for it.
I kind of want to give Impossible a try if just out of curiosity, But following the link below, the first price tag I heard confirmed my suspicions that fake meat is more expensive than real meat and I can't even afford real meat in any worthwhile quantity(I'm surviving mainly on a diet of ramen, rice, and canned beans(Black, pinto, kidney, and red beans being regulars to the rotation, beans in chili sauce is common too, not a fan of chickpeas(though I can manage if they're mashed up before adding them to a bowl of ramen or rice, didn't care for Tofu the one time I tried it and have never tried unprocess soy beans, I sometimes add a can of peas, corn, or mixed veggies or get black-eyed peas when Wal-Mart doesn't have enough beans in stock).
Does Impossible offset any of the other reasons for my involuntary vegetarianism? In other words, does it have the same storage constraints that real meat has a short shelf life unless frozen or highly processed? If Impossible requires freezing, can it go straight from freezer to a meal? Is impossible any more convenient to prepare a meal from than meat? The trailer I'm renting has a stove, but it's gas and no one here can afford fuel for it, and even if I had access to a working stove or hot plate, I'm not fully comfortable using either appliance... I have an electric kettle, and when I make ramen with beans, I just dump the beans and any veggies or cheese in with the blocks of hard noodles, pour boiling water over and cover it for about 30 minutes for everything to cook and access broth to soak in, for rice and beans, I cook rice in a mini-rice cooker and mix in the beans after dumping the rice into a bowl, letting the heat from the rice cook the beans.
We have a microwave, but it's the kind with a completely flat control panel, so if I don't want to blindly press buttons until it starts and then count seconds hoping I started it for long enough, I need to get help from a sighted housemate, and they'r'e usually at work when I make my supper.
That said, reading this so made me wish I could afford a whopper, double quarter pounder with cheese, footlong chicken teriyaki or spicy italian, 12-pack of soft tacos, or a large the Works... sadly, pretty much all of those are out of my budget and of the hinted fast food chains, Papa John's is the only one that delivers(and even if I could afford it, it's probably too late since they won't deliver to the trailer park I live in after sunset).
"This is the best vegetarian bacon I have ever had."
In other words, the least bad substitute for something that's actually good. This feels like damnation by faint praise.
I wonder if there is an opening for some edgy restaurant that serves its customers vegetarian versions of endangered species etc. Or even breaks the ultimate taboo with vegetarian long pig!
Can someone tell me how you get a vegetarian drumstick? Is it just like plant-based product smooshed around a stick in a drumstick shape, or what? Also, apropos of nothing, I did have alligator once and didn't like it - it was like very chewy, tough chicken.
Amy’s Drive-Thru up in the Marin hinterlands does a pretty good vegan approximation of fast food burgers (and shakes!) — if you ever find yourself in Corte Madera, you should check it out.
Bacon doesn't seem all that hard to imitate. Soy sauce, liquid smoke, tomato paste, and frying combine to make a very bacon-y flavor. Even just putting soy sauce on tempeh and shallow-frying it is enough to satisfy my desire for bacon. (It doesn't *really* taste like bacon, but it satisfies the urge.)
Probably a bit far for you to visit regularly (we have problems ourselves since we are so far south and its out of our Door Dash range) But, if you want to try somewhere amazing, try Garden Fresh Chinese in Mountain View. My GF is sometimes vegan and I typically cringe at vegan restaurant spice selection. (I immediately feel a severe aversion just walking into a vegan place and smelling their spice profile). That said, Garden Fresh is one of the few vegan places I would happily visit anytime and its definitely the only vegan place I would choose over a non-vegan option. Its just a hole in the wall in a strip mall, yet its faux shrimp are better than the real thing. I cannot really describe them except to say, these are the platonic ideal of shrimp. I would be convinced they were feeding me real shrimp except real shrimp are never ever this perfect. Im pretty sure they make them the normal way vegan shrimp is made but, I don't know how theirs is so much better. Their vegan Sweet and Sour Pork and Beef with Broccoli are great too. I think I slightly prefer them to the standard carnivore versions but its not food of the gods like the shrimp.
When you peel the cheeseburger out of my cold dead fingers, vegan boy.
Why would you call a sandwich with bacon, lettuce, avocado (or guacamole), and tomato a BLAT instead of the clearly superior LGBT?
There's a place in Boulder called the Bumbling Bee that has really, really tasty vegan junk food. I love milkshakes, they are probably the single thing I miss most about being vegetarian, and they nail milkshakes (and malts!) and all sorts of other good stuff
Speaking as a lifelong vegetarian, I think `fake meat' (including the Impossible variety) is gross and disgusting, and `vegetarian' food should be embraced for what it is instead of shoehorned into some facsimile of meat. Accordingly, I never order the `fake meat' options (although I did try an Impossible burger once, to see what it was about) so...
I very much enjoyed the tone of these reviews, but sadly there doesn't seem to be anything to motivate me to try fake meat. Seems like normal nutrient poor, calorie-rich American restaurant food, just more processed.
My hope still lies in lab-grown meat.
Optimistic path for non-meat meat (please tear to shreds, then roll up in a pancake):
Previously - much worse than meat
Today - somewhat worse than meat
Tomorrow - as nice as meat
Next - indistinguishable from meat
Then - somewhat better than meat
After that - new versions of existing meats, e.g. hybrid duck-lamb flavour or hybrid meat-plus-other-food-group
Eventually - new meat experiences unlike any existing ones
Ultimately - entirely new genres of taste/texture unlike meat or anything else we currently eat
Love the post. If you're looking for more hu ger options specifically, I recommend the veggie burger at Gott's refresher. They also have Impossible Burger, but I find I like veggie burgers more, in general as well as here specifically, because restaurants add more of their own style. The flavor is highly comparable. I think there's one in SF (I go to the one here in Napa)
"Chinese food is a good match for fake meat", bruh. Have you ever tasted REAL Chinese dishes? All what you have is the American Chinese food.
> The bacon was amazing. I have gotten some friends to try it, and they all agree it’s as good as real bacon. At least as good as real bacon.
In the same sense margarine is as good as butter...
Is Crave vs Ike's the Geno's vs. Pat's of Berkeley?
If you're in Dallas area check out thebonelessbutcher.com
They have top notch vegan steaks. People have made everything from chicken fried steak to beef tips and rice. I've eaten them as is with veggies on the side just as you would a real beef steak and I gotta say it's the best I've ever had.
"Bay Area" but they're all in the Oakland-Berkeley area. That may be great for Scott, but it's a little misleading for those of us from, for instance, Silicon Valley. At least Ike's is a local chain which exists down here too.
"By this point you’ve probably tried Impossible Burgers"
To me this reads exactly like "By this point you've probably had your scrotum pierced" --- that is, I know that there are people who get their scrota pierced, but there is absolutely no chance I would ever do that, much less "probably" do it. :-)
Note that I'm not criticizing people who get their scrota pierced. Doesn't pick my pocket, doesn't break my leg. Enjoy!
I'm just saying that it's not something I would ever do.
In my (dated) experience, the best thing at Souley Vegan was a cayenne lemonade, which also improved the rest of the food.
If you’re in the Philly area, I recommend Plnt Burger. It’s at the Whole Foods in Wynnewood, PA. We’re not vegetarian and were very impressed. The burger was great, the mushroom-based “chicken” sandwich was remarkably convincing, and the fries were the best I’ve had in years. Great sauces, too. And they make excellent ice cream, with real chocolate.
They’re getting it right in that it’s absolutely not health food; their frying game is on point. Everything is amazingly crispy and tastes like a treat, the way a burger and fries should. They just removed the animals and turned everything else we love about this kind of food up to 11, which is a strategy I admire.
https://www.plntburger.com/
Hear me out: Pascal's wager, but for veganism.
The wager applies to people who care about being moral. If the vegans are right about animal consumption being a moral atrocity, then non-vegans are committing a grievous error. If the vegans are wrong ... what potential harm is there in going vegan anyway? Does anyone *really* believe there is a risk of veganism turning out to be a moral atrocity?
I've eaten an Impossible Burger twice, once at Burger King and once at a local gastropub. Both times, I thought it tasted very much like a hamburger - but a somewhat dry, slightly overcooked hamburger than entirely lacked the mouth-watering richness one hopes for from red meat. In other words, it might be an adequate substitute for a fast food burger, but not for a really good burger. Is that as good as it gets, or did I just get a couple of unskillfully prepared ones?
So what about brisket without the sauce? No other self-respecting Texans here are going to point out that you never put sauce on brisket?
I wrote a review of the nutritional properties of Impossible Burgers a few years back: https://conceptspacecartography.com/a-nutrition-focused-review-of-the-impossible-burger/ . I believe they've made some recipe tweaks, but I still believe the conclusion (that Impossible beef and animal beef are on par, nutritionally). They've started showing up in grocery stores (including the one I shop at, Berkeley Bowl on Oregon St). I'm still very much not a vegetarian, but I'm eating a couple per week, displacing what would otherwise have been beef, and other than the price tag I don't see any downsides to this.
I went to Butcher's Son this weekend to see if they actually "solved bacon", and they did not. I'm guessing Scott hasn't actually had bacon in a while, because it was obviously not bacon.
That said, it was far better than I expected. I was expecting something along the lines of Bac'n Bits, which is a crunchy, salty, smoky product, but this was actually much "meatier" in texture. I personally prefer my bacon to be on the more rare side, so this was a welcome change from any fake bacon I've tasted before. That said, the texture was good, but it really wasn't the texture of bacon. It was more similar to something like pastrami. Well cooked bacon will have several different textures to it, the chewy meat parts, to the caramelized, melt in your mouth fatty parts, and the soft juicy fatty parts. This was just kind of a uniform texture. They did try to include some fake fatty parts, but the texture wasn't much different from the "meat" parts.
Taste wise it was good, but not great. It reminded me of turkey bacon, where you get the saltiness and smokiness, but it lacks the depth of flavor. There was also a sweet aftertaste that was a little off-putting, but that was only noticeable when you ate the bacon straight. In the sandwich I didn't notice it.
Overall, I would say that fake bacon definitely is not "solved". It was like 75% of the way to turkey bacon, which is like 25% of the way to real bacon.
The BLAT also has a fake fried chicken tender on it, and that tasted nothing like chicken the texture was nowhere near right, but it tasted pretty good as a completely new food item. There's just no reason to claim it was anything near chicken. The vegan mayonnaise was worthless, runny and flavorless. The tomatoes were also garbage, but I'm not going to hold that against them because I'm the one ordering a BLT in February.
The sandwich overall was pretty tasty though, and I would get it again if I were near the restaurant, but I wouldn't go out of my way for it, and $15 was a pretty high price for what you got.
Since American chicken tastes like fake meat anyway, it is relatively easy to fake.
I ignored this post for a while because I'm East Coast, Not a Vegan, Strict Kosher & figured not for me. Had 4 hours of driving last night for a COVID Shot (Yay NJ) & listened to the podcast version. I laughed the whole time. This was great More Please!!
If you're ever in the badlands of the bay aka San Jose, there's some really phenomenal vegetarian Vietnamese places here. I especially like the tofu maker shops here that serve triple duty as retail, deli, and restaurant.
I'm not vegetarian, but there a tofu shop near me called Dong Phuong Tofu. They have the best bowl of vegetarian Bun Bo Hue noodle soup I've ever had. I would actually go there just to order that, even being non-veg. I've had the actual seafood and beef based Bun Bo Hue plenty of times and I'd still say this vegetarian version compares favorably to any of those. Fair warning it's 1000% a hole in the wall dive, you'll probably have bad, but efficient service if you don't speak Vietnamese, and it's cash only.