AIBU to hate the veggie option?

[BabooshkaKate]

It's always halumi.

Why? Why must it always be halumi?

How many different ways can you do halumi?

Why do restaurants never think outside the box?

exexpat Thank you - I looked at those links and pinned about 6 recipes from the Maitreya! Their shallot, mushroom & chestnut bourgignon is going to be perfect for Saturday night's awkward dinner guests

Can I just say how SICK I am of risotto?

YES! It's a standing joke in my office that I'm going to be lumbered with risotto at any work do (good natured joking; none of us is involved with choosing the venue/menu). It's nearly always the non option.

It is truly the new vegetarian lasagne.

I think provision for vegetarians has got worse in the last 10 years. Places used to make more of an effort - now many just have a terrible lazy option that they have the gall to charge a comparable cost for as the meat option. Risotto does NOT cost the same as steak!

I have to say, though, that the worst advert for vegetarian food on the planet is the old-school vegetarian cafe. Grated carrot with sultanas that's been sitting there so long it's bitter and swimming in water? Slimy strings of courgette? Burnt homity pie that has potato that's still crunchy in the middle? No thanks!

Anyone tried Mildred's in Soho? I had a gorgeous black bean burrito there a few years back, the menu was divine.

Ahh I love Mildred's. I am obsessed with their pecan pie.

My colleague complained about the vegan menu I was offered (rocket & sundried tomato salad, singapore noodles) saying it was not festive enough. Instead I will be having drum roll butternut squash soup followed by mushroom risotto. In a butternut squash!! Good thing I like BNS

Went to a local pub for Sunday lunch and asked what the option for vegetarians was, a mushroom burger..fine sounded ok, strange to have with a roast but ok. It came out and it was a big mushroom in bun. Ffs.

Halumi counts as imaginative veggie food around here.

I am not vegetarian, but often opt for vegetarian as I don't eat much meat as I have an issue with the way it is farmed and produced, and we eat too much meat anyway. I agree many of the vegetarian options are grim (particularly the idea of a mushroom in a bun!) which is a real pity as there are so many great vegetarian meals. I think maybe your standard restaurant/pub just don't get it.

YANBU but I am afraid it's par for the course in mainstream restaurants, particularly at Christmas when menus tend to be unimaginative "staples".

Looking for low-cal meals when I began a 5:2 diet, I soon found that half a dozen in-season, locally sourced vegetables, simmered for a while with a tin of tomatoes, makes a great base for lots of different dishes. Not only low cal, but very tasty to boot.

(In an effort to drive down the cal count, using lots of celery and mushrooms, my 5:2 diet veg curry came in at under 100 cals.)

Adding a few herbs/spices to this dish - it's a pasta sauce; add decent curry paste - it's a veg curry; add dried chillies and red kidney beans - it's a bowl of chilli; with some form of meat substitute, it's chilli non carne; add creamed coconut, Thai spices, lemon juice, soy sauce and it's a Thai chilli non carne .

Lentils and potatoes and onions = potato hash - I'd happily order that in a restaurant.

Yes, yes, yes - the mushroom burger that is actually just a mushroom with some mayo on it should be consigned to the fiery pit of BBQ hell. Lazy, lazy, lazy.

I once went to a posh pub in the Peak District. It was full of women in sequins on a Sunday lunchtime. The only veggie option was a cheese baguette. For Sunday lunch. Never been back!

I've posted before about my posh meal out at an iconic London building.

Starter was celeriac and Gorgonzola velouté, so they were asked to replace the Gorgonzola with a vegetarian blue cheese and instead chose to leave it out entirely. Leaving me with a bowl of celeriac pureé which tasted of nothing and which the diner sitting next to thought was hummous in a bowl. If only!

Oh DEAR rhonda! That does sound bad. It's not like there aren't ways to jazz up celeriac puree either so that it is more interesting.

I think veggie food really tests a chef. To make something that just sings with flavour sorts the women from the girls

I think if you can't create a tasty veggie option, you have no right calling yourself a chef!

I completely agree, zoe.

But you try telling that to Gordon Ramsay.

But you try telling that to Gordon Ramsay.

Knob of the highest order, that one.

John Torode as well. Although I did notice in the last series of celebrity Masterchef he wasn't being a knob about vegetarians, and several times reprimanded the contestants for thinking up boring veggie options. Wonder what caused that change?

Agree about Gordon Ramsay's personal attitude. Oddly, though, his restaurants do cater very well indeed for veggies.

I love nut roast and I'm not even veggie.

I have horrifically late in life (age 29) recently embraced the concept of a meat-free meal and have started cooking a lot more vegetarian dishes at home.

BUT I rarely order a vegetarian meal when I am out. Not because I don't want to but because they so rarely sound as nice as the meat option, and usually seem like they are not good value for money. If restaurants offered better meat-free options they would appeal to lots of people - not just vegetarians.

(YAB a bit U though, because I love haloumi and it's one of the few veggie things I would order in a restaurant because cost-wise it's on a par with meat and I love getting value for money!)

I was a vegetarian for seven years. The vegetarian option always seemed to be stuffed peppers. Always.

rolling - yeah, I kind of agree about value for money. Why does pasta cost £15.99 if a steak is £17.99?

It's weird about the veggie option being worse. In restaurants, it often is these days. But at mass catering (e.g. a wedding) in the same restaurant, the veggie option is often nicer. On aeroplanes - nicer. And let's not open the box of the buffet where all the veggie food is eaten and most of the meat is left! I think basically restauranteurs coast with veggie food a lot of the time, but I don't really understand that.

In my city, there is a restaurant that's quite renowned for meat, been on Gordon Ramsay's show etc. The veggie option is often nettle gnocchi. Now I like me a good gnocchi dish, but this is not a good one. It's like eating polystyrene wrapped in dirty fog. I do not believe the chef has actually tasted it, because it's all but inedible. DH (also veggie) has to do a bit of entertaining as part of his job, so frequents restaurants - but now won't use this particular one because the dish is so awful. So they are losing out on meat-eating custom as well. It makes no sense in business terms - why don't they just put something decent on?

As far as I know, the price of restaurant food has very little to do with the cost of ingredients, unless you're getting into Wagu(?) beef territory and the like. A nettle gnocchi doesn't cost much difference to produce than a beef burger when you factor in everything else.

polystyrene wrapped in dirty fog

John torode - now dating Lisa Faulkner who I think was veggie at least for a while, she certainly has a lot of veggie recipes

Business sense - absolutely! If I'm eating out with a group they do tend to take my diet into consideration, I'm not usually the only veggie either, plus if veggies are CHOOSING the restaurants for a group sitting (and more people, including higher ups in business are becoming veggie for health reasons) they're NOT going to choose the poor veggie option.

As I said before 2 restaurants in my town that didn't do ANY veggie option at all, one now closed (bankrupt) one not far behind (veggie is one thing they also just seem to have a crap chef according to reviews)

My DD has recently turned vegetarian and so I've started to notice the lack of options; normally only one vegetarian dish in pubs/bistros. Indian restaurants really are the best at it, so much choice.

If you are catering what do you do about the fact vegetarians are 3% of the population and vegans fewer? In certain parts of the country it'll be skewed so in rural areas there may be next to none of either, though lots of people are keen to drop the amount of meat they eat or fishetarian or whatever.

It's a hard call for a chef if they're not charging top dollar, don't live in an area where they can employ good kitchen staff who don't just put it together by numbers. And getting the ingredients outside a city can be expensive.

I'd suggest Ottolenghi/south Indian and dropping the prices for vegetarian/vegan meals - though the problem is good vegetarian/vegan can take more prep time and staff costs are the main element - on top of which if you don't have much call for it, expensive ingredients can go off.

I agree it would be great to have as much choice as carnivores but the sums don't work out until there's a tipping point and 5% (committed vegetarian/vegan) is not that (source Vegetarian Society, poss out of date).

Good luck to the vegetarian/vegan future. Good food is key - why don't you contact the BBC Food Programme with your concerns? might be interesting.

Strict vegetarians/vegans may only account for 5% of the population, but there are a lot more people who are pescetarian, don't eat red meat, are trying to cut down their meat consumption, or are just not stuck in the mindset that a meal isn't complete without a chunk of meat in it - see this article about declining meat consumption. So if restaurants could come up with a few more appealing and imaginative vegetarian options, they would be targeting a wider market than just the full-time vegetarians.

I'm sure many of the people I see eating at veggie restaurants like Vanilla Black or David Bann (packed out on a Tuesday night last time I was there) are not actually vegetarian, but are happy to eat food without meat or fish in it when it is well done and interesting.