No, vegan restaurants generally don’t serve meat, dairy or other animal products. But as a previous poster pointed out, we don’t expect Italian restaurants to serve Chinese food, or Japanese restaurants to offer a Sunday roast, simply to demonstrate how inclusive they are 😂
Restaurants specialise in particular types of food. It’s hardly a controversial concept 🙃
A vegan restaurant isn’t excluding non vegans. Its entire menu is available to them! The fact that you might prefer something else doesn’t mean you’re being discriminated against.
It’s as if you think vegan food is some strange, exclusive category of cuisine. In reality, plant based food is already woven into virtually every culinary tradition you encounter, from cheap and cheerful to Michelin starred fine dining.
You’ve almost certainly eaten and enjoyed lots of foods without giving their vegan credentials a second thought. But if we put those same foods together on a restaurant menu, it suddenly becomes an exercise in virtue signalling 🥱
Your first venture into thinking about vegan restaurants has somehow led you straight to an accusation of virtue signalling rather than the fairly obvious conclusion that different restaurants serve different types of food.
You’ve managed to take something as unremarkable as a restaurant choosing what food to serve and frame it as an example of some imagined cultural injustice. You could have asked a perfectly reasonable question about menus, but instead you chose to attach a judgement to people simply because they make different choices from you… That says more about your attitude towards others than it does about vegan restaurants.
Perhaps the question isn’t why vegan restaurants don’t serve meat, but why the existence of a restaurant catering to people with different values seems to bother you quite so much 🧐
Just in case you’re still wondering what you could possibly eat in a vegan restaurant, here’s a tiny selection of perfectly ordinary foods that can be vegan, many of which are traditionally plant based...
Beans on toast, chips, hash browns, soups of every description, crumpets with jam, countless pasta dishes, breads, confectionery, rice dishes, risotto, ratatouille, gazpacho, lots of Mediterranean dishes, sweet potato fries, an enormous variety of Greek dishes, hummus, falafel, baba ganoush, tabbouleh, couscous, tagines, a vast range of Indian curries, vegetable samosas, chana masala, dhal, poppadoms, countless Chinese takeaway favourites, various sushi dishes, Thai, Indonesian and Vietnamese dishes, Mexican guacamole, nachos with salsa, bean burritos, refried beans, corn tortillas, traditional corn on the cob, American peanut butter and jam sandwiches, Caribbean rice and peas, Ethiopian dishes (ever tried injera?), Lebanese fattoush, Turkish delight, caramelised fruits, poached pears, summer pudding, lemon granita, plenty of sorbets, mochi, halva, marzipan, dark chocolate, boiled sweets, popcorn… Across practically every cuisine on the planet, from the cheapest everyday staples to some of the most expensive delicacies in the world.
I could go on but I think you get the idea. It’s just food 😂