To expect pubs to serve a decent vegetarian meal?

[Allshallbewell2021]

Three pub meals over the past three months have been dire or inedible. One risotto (rice not cooked) one bean/taco meal (clearly from a tin really grim), one Xmas dinner butternut squash thing (clearly from the freezer, slimy and disgusting).
And not cheap either.
Tonight I had chips, peas and battered halloumi (too much straight cheese for anyone) but quite nice.

Is a good vegetarian pub option not economically viable?

I'm vegetarian and always get halloumi on a pub menu if it's there, it's what I look for! I hate mushrooms but find most places have a mushroom dish over anything else.

I wonder if the slowing of sales of fake meat are because people turning vegan/veggie buy them to start with but cut them out as they learn more about cooking vegan food.

I suspect the reason that pubs are seeing a drop in demand for veggie and vegan food despite the rise of veganism is because of the trend to make them the same option - a meat eater might have happily ordered a vegetarian lasagne or a cheesy broccoli bake sometimes, but they are less likely to go two dietary steps away and choose a vegan burger with vegan cheese over a very similar meat one (or choose anything at all made of jackfruit ever).

The vegetarians are still ordering the veggie/now vegan option because they can't eat the other dishes anyway, but the meat-eaters have stopped choosing it - and there are more meat-eaters than veggies out there, so it makes a difference.

“I wonder if the slowing of sales of fake meat are because people turning vegan/veggie buy them to start with but cut them out as they learn more about cooking vegan food.”

Depends- it’s still quick, frozen, convenience food. I don’t call it fake meat though. As in “I’m having fake meat tonight”. 😂 I bloody love Quorn mince, greggs vegan sausage rolls (and don’t tell me ewww because you can never get one, because pesky meat eaters will grab one to ‘be healthy’. I love the cottage pies.
I do alot of cooking from scratch, DH and DD eat meat but they’ll tuck in to vegan meals because they’re delicious and filling. I’ve lost weight from a vegan diet at times, depends if I eat chips, or lashings of plant butter.
I love mushrooms but not halloumi, so that limits me somewhat as people seem to enjoy it.

I miss the vegetable burger- I would have that even when I did eat meat as I preferred it. They need to bring back the vegetable options, but I hope they don’t stuff them with cheese - 🤮 creating an unhealthy dish. I don’t always have time to make several dishes meat, then vegetable based. Often I’ll have what DH has, but cut the meat.

I do eat eggs, unlike most vegans, but only from the small holding around the corner, they have a lot of ex battery hens who lay eggs as and when. It’s not normal for a chicken to pop out eggs constantly. It’s inhumane.
We all drink Alpro my cuppa plant milk as none of us can tell the difference. But that’s the only one I’ll buy. Plant butter- can’t tell the difference.

I think we should all eat and live more sustainably, you don’t have to be vegan or vegetarian but it would help if people had some days off animal products. We only buy free range, organic meats- whether that helps or not I don’t know.

Yes, pea protein and jackfruit make me want to vomit.

I do like a Linda McCartney sausage or sausage roll though for those completely can’t be arsed evenings.

That’s comes across as very entitled. Restaurants that are busy don’t really have the time to concoct meals for the few. We try but no matter what we do it’s wrong , ‘veggie Thai curry’ eww don’t like curry, veggie burger eww to bland, melanzana, don’t like aubergine so we just give up. I don’t mind vegetarians in my restaurant as we cook from fresh so I say look at the menu and make your own. Vegans I just don’t cater for and bad allergies terrify me and I’d rather not accommodate as I don’t want be sued.

I think this is a fair point as well. People have been moaning that the vegetarian options are not good enough for years. There are threads on here from a decade ago with vegetarians moaning that they don’t want veggie lasagne or mushroom risotto and how they want better options. And that was before the rise in veganism so vegetarians can’t blame the piss poor options on that.

Now there are other options like fake meat burgers, excessive amounts of hummus and falafel, jackfruit burgers…and veggies are still not happy.

I remember reading how some vegetarians were unhappy that every vegetarian option came with cheese and how they didn’t want to eat cheese all the time. Now their cheese has (apparentley) been taken away and now they are unhappy because they want their cheese back. Make up your minds.

I think the issue around cheese has always been - ‘is it vegetarian?’ ‘Dunno’ ‘so why is the meal described as vegetarian?’.

Veggies I know are pretty cool and used to navigating menus. The only fusspots I have experienced are performative vegans/veganaryites who can choose the meat/fish/poultry options if they want. I also noticed a downturn in options when cookery shows on tv (like MasterChef) had a phase of offal and unusual meats…

There are very few items I will see on a menu and think ‘I just can’t eat that’ and these are mostly items that will mess with my blood sugar and make me pretty ill.

There is no hive vegetarian mind - presumably the people complaining about cheese on every vegetarian option are not the same as those who now complain it has been replaced by vegan cheese.

You can’t please everyone all the time and no restaurant could expect to cater to everyone’s tastes, but a couple of decent vegetarian options on a menu, plus a vegan option, isn’t a huge ask.

This is exactly it though.Everyone has their own taste and restaurants and pubs cannot provide dishes that meet everyone’s tastes preferences.

What might be a decent vegetarian option to one person might be disgusting to someone else…and the one person it isn’t decent for will continue to complain.

It’s not even a vegetarian vs vegan thing. I know vegetarians who love all the fake meat options and want it is realistic as possible. I also know vegans who dislike the fake meat and want more whole foods.

When it comes down to it however no matter what you do you cannot please everyone…which is why threads like this exist.

“we want cheese (without rennet, obvs).”

Since the calf that the rennet is coming from is being killed anyway, because it’s a by-product of the milk production that made the cheese (the cow needed to have a calf to get her to make milk, but a boy came out), would it not make more sense to use it? Be like an Eskimo - if you’re going to kill an animal for food then use all of it.

What is entitled about the OP saying she wants her food properly cooked? Or about expecting a professional restaurant not to put the same main ingredient in both the only starter and only main course? Or expecting the only veggie option something which vaguely works with rest of the menu?

We have all eaten overpriced and badly prepared veggie meals from restaurants in this situation - its the quality and value compared to the meat options which is often piss poor and the inflexibility on menus.

Of course some people won't like the only veggie option on the menu. If your only meat option was veal escalopes you would have some meat eaters not liking it - would you whinge about that?

Honestly, I would genuinely rather you just said "we don't cater" than slap a badly thought out and badly cooked meal in front of me.

If you say "we don't cater" then people organising group meals will look elsewhere and I won't be expected to be grateful for the kind of crap meals the OP describes in her OP, usually charged in line with the much better value meat dishes.

For those of don’t know, traditional cheese is made using rennet, which come from the stomachs of slaughter baby calves. But the calves are there because like all mammals cows only produce milk if they’ve had a baby. So you have to get them pregnant. This is usually AI using a “super-bull” that is the son of a cow that produced lots of milk. But if the pregnant cow then produces a male calf then that’s useless for a dairy herd. So they’re generally raised for veal or killed straight away. Their rennet used to get put into cheese but I think nearly all cheese is vegetarian now, so I think their bodies are just thrown away.

Wow, what an attitude to customers.

Christ almighty. All vegetarians want is a properly made decent meal. Not the ‘oh shit we’d better add something for the vegetarians, oh fuck them the risotto will fucking do’ option.

Yes we did use to complain about the fuck you risotto and the copious goats cheese but we had no idea at the time that it was going to get worse and we were just going to end up with frozen ultra processed crap.

No because I choose not to eat dead animal products. Otherwise I’d merrily chow down roadkill.

So you’re okay with the calf being killed to make your food as long as its body is thrown away and not put into the food you’re eating? I confess I struggle to work out the moral distinction. I mean either way, it lived for a mere day or so before being killed.

What would you like to see on a menu?

To be fair a lot of people just don’t like the idea of eating bits of dead animal and it doesn’t go any deeper than that.

If you say "we don't cater" then people organising group meals will look elsewhere and I won't be expected to be grateful for the kind of crap meals the OP describes in her OP, usually charged in line with the much better value meat dishes.

This! The only thing worse than eating a terrible veggie meal is having to pretend it's nice so you don't embarrass the person who picked the restaurant.

"How's your pasta?"

"Oh yes lovely. Plain tomato sauce is my favourite. And I've never had it with a roast dinner before so that's different!"

There is a difference between taste and standards though.

I am all for restaurants offering a range of dishes - fake meat, whole foods - according to their chosen target demographic and what they want to supply. If you go to a burger joints fake meat is reasonable and you would be unreasonable to complain (although there are more traditional alternatives they could offer as well or instead - their choice).

But the OP is largely complaining about poor standards of meal - improperly cooked risotto, for example - which is unacceptable whether it’s a vegetarian, vegan or meat dish.

Some restaurants do seem to think that the vegetarian offering is an afterthought that doesn’t need to be of reasonable quality. Sure, vegetarians could avoid eating there on principle, but that gets awkward when your best mate organises their birthday party there and you either get berated for not going, or for trying to dictate where everyone eats. Or you suck it up, go along and support crap V options and the restaurant continues to think what they’re doing is fine 🙄

I totally get why vegetarians are annoyed by it, and all the fake meat vs whole foods, cheese vs vegan cheese, endless mushrooms, whatever complaints are a red herring, and just give people the opportunity to label vegetarians / vegans as fussy and difficult.

That was me last weekend. It was my mother’s birthday. I had to be polite but if we’d not been at a family dinner I’d have sent mine back as inedible.

The only main course option for me was a fake vegan meat burger or a vegetable lasagna. I chose the lasagna as the being the less bad.

I looked sadly at my plate of soggy pasta swimming in a tasteless tomato sauce with a twee shopping trolly of chips as the sole accompaniment whilst the rest of the family tucked into a full roast with all the trimmings.

I ate my chips and left the rest.

Well a place near me that caters well for vegetarians and vegans has these two options.

Baked rosemary & garlic camembert
Turkish figs, grissini & Italian style salad

Fabulous fungi wild mushroom rigatoni
woodfired artichokes, butternut squash,
sun-blushed tomato, porcini cream & pecorino

Now I didn’t know that I wanted either of those things, but they both sound lovely. It’s the job of a chef to make new dishes. Meat eaters look at a menu and pick the thing they most like the sound of. Vegetarians pick the only option they have.

edit: they have a separate vegan menu.

Both those options were £18 and £10 less than the meat dishes!

We had a lovely Turkish recently. Proper authentic Turkish food that happened to be vegan. No weird and wonderful ‘meat subs’ or ingredients.

I will admit those things do sound nice.

In most places however ‘chefs’ tend to be hired to take things out of the deep freeze and throw them in the microwave 😂