To feel I almost have to apologise for being veggie...

[Loopylala7]

We were invited out tonight with a big group, but I couldn't go due to no babysitter. Anyway DH casually mentions that, well there was nothing on the menu for me anyway. This is following a holiday where being a vegetarian was considered weird, so had to survive on junk food.

These are just a few of my recent experiences. TBH I feel lucky if I go to a restaurant and have two dishes to choose from. Am I being unreasonable to think this is unreasonable?

Rufus I'm not that near Guildford either.

DryChickenCouple were very rude & wasteful. Funny that, rude, fussy meat eaters... I thought that was only vegetarians I don't blame you for not inviting MissLentilPie back. I have, on occasion, had to check what was in something... some people really don't think, but I would never accuse someone of lying!

I get bored of being confronted with yet another risotto or veggie lasagne in pubs. I wish chefs could be a bit more imaginative.

Chefs? In pubs? The vast majority of it is reheated from frozen pre-packaged food.

chipping, that's a relief (about the OP), but I'm a bit disappointed as I was getting ready to fire out my first ever LTB.

But never in a restaurant you are paying to eat like everyone else and should have a choice of food that is to your taste

Why? If you don't like pizza, do you think your local pizza place is obligated to nip around the corner and get the ingredients for a Coq au Vin?

There's a menu in the window. If you don't like what's on it, go somewhere else. In other news, if you want a decent cup of tea, don't go to Starbucks where they haven't got any boiling water.

I'm not keen on going to my work Xmas do as I would be charged the same (expensive) price as the non-vegetarians for a poor offering. The non-vege option is a salmon starter, turkey and all the trimmings, followed by Xmas pudding. The vege option is tomato soup followed by an unspecified vegetable risotto. I can have the Xmas pudding though, woo.

Why on earth they can't make a vege pie or a nut roast or similar, and serve that with vege gravy and the same vegetables as the turkey dish is a puzzle. As for tomato soup for a starter, it's just miserable - unimaginative, boring, cheap and probably poor quality too.

Oh if you are fired up, just go to the Relationships board, it wont take you long to find a thread to use it on :(

kiki didn't post her weekend menu, such a shame.

I think Yabu, a restaurant is a business and being a vegiterian is a choice, vegiterians are not unable to eat meat they choose not to eat meat so why should a business offer more options when it doesn't make financial sence to do so?

I have been a vegiterian for much of my life although I now eat meat. I still often choose the vegiterian option which is in my opinion more imaginative and tastier than the meat choices but we tend to either eat at Indian or thai places or a place that freshly cooks all their dishes.

duh you seem to think that vegetarian food is a specific style of food the same as - Indian, Chinese, Thai, Pizza. It's not.

I'm not keen on going to my work Xmas do as I would be charged the same (expensive) price as the non-vegetarians for a poor offering.

And that's less excusable, because they've got the notice. The reason small places won't do much vegetarian is that if they put it on the menu there's an expectation they'll actually be able to do it, and given there'll only be a small number of people ordering it, guessing the quantities of ingredients to buy and prep is very difficult. The fewer people order something, the harder it is to avoid either running out or being left with a large surplus. I would suspect that if a random restaurant offered multiple vegetarian options, on many nights they would serve precisely zero of them.

But if they've got three months' notice, they should be able to do whatever they're asked for. If they can't, find somewhere else.

I bet many of you would have something to say if the meat options all suddenly became Horse, Dog, Cat, Guinea Pig.

No, Chipping, I don't. But there are cuisines that are inherently veggie or at least veggie-friendly (south Indian, historically Buddhist parts of south-east Asia) and cuisines that aren't (most of Europe, most of China). And that goes double for restaurants, because historically even if the local cuisine didn't eat meat all the time, the rich and the celebrating did, so restaurant cuisine is more meat-based than the home cooking of the same culture may be. There is no such thing as "vegetarian French cuisine", for example, so a "vegetarian French restaurant" is effectively a specific style of food.

Unfortunately the power of choosing the location for my work Xmas do is not in my control. Neither can I realistically ask them to consider something else, as it's already been negotiated (presumably by non-vegetarians who didn't notice the crap vege offering).

I wish they would serve up something like this for vegetarians at Christmas.

I bet many of you would have something to say if the meat options all suddenly became Horse, Dog, Cat, Guinea Pig.

Not that old canard. Horse is lovely: I buy it when in France to cook myself, and would seek it out in restaurants. Horse steak is fantastic. Dog's shit to eat: I'm pretty sure I've eaten it on a couple of occasions, and it was stringy and tasteless. I can't see why you'd bother eating cat or guinea pig as there's not a lot of meat on them, but I can't see any other particular problem. Did you have a point?

To head off other options: yes, I eat all parts of the animal, and one reason food in the US can be rubbish is that they're ludicrously squeamish about "variety meats"; yes I've done my own butchery; yes, I've killed animals to eat; yes I've eaten roadkill.

I'm sure there are silly meat-eaters who believe it's raised in plastic wrappers, but I'm well aware that meat involves killing fluffy animals.

Duh No, Chipping, I don't then fgs stop saying that asking for a vegetarian meal is like asking for Pizza in a Thai restaurant. It's not.

Any chance of that Shepherds pie recipe? The one with lentils and marmite gravy??...

Pescetarian but don't do dairy. It's tough, normally a bit of over cooked salmon and some new potatoes and green beans. If I didn't eat fish I would be able to eat in maybe restaurants.

There's fair bit of missing the point on this thread- My gripe is that apparent trained chefs have no clue what to cook if the request is meat free. I don't expect a 10 choice menu bit I do expect a person who went to college to train to come up with something!!!!!

Irish restaurants have perfected the pasta in a cream sauce-complete with mashed potato and roast carrots .

I loved my pasta and boiled cabbage while in hospital- seriously who the hell would think that is acceptable???

Mmm - any chance you could PM me the pasta and mash recipe, chunky? Sounds to die for

Well suburban you must start off with an unnatural fondness for carbs and no clue of flavour, texture or taste!

I tell you what I found surprising and that was eating out in Scotland. I expected it to be more like NZ, but it wasn't. I must have tried 10 different types of vegetarian Hagis, Neeps & Tatties :)

YANBU. There are a lot of restaurants and cafes that I will avoid now because of their god awful veggie choices. Trying to find something that doesn't have cheese in it too, FGS not all veggies eat cheese! (I love cheese, but have an intolerance of it so have to avoid it nowadays).

YANBU, I'm not a veggie but it seems that most places have the token veggie option, pasta or pastry with cheese. Imagine how bad it must be to try to go out if you're vegan. One of the best veggie meals I ever had was at Claridge's Gordon Ramsay's restaurant, I had the veggie taster menu and it was delicious. The maitre d' said that the head chef who created the veggie dishes had been brought up as a vegetarian until he was a teenager and so obviously knew what he was doing. So delicious.

always that sounds fab! How long ago was it? I wonder if he's still there?!