To expect hotels and restaurants to provide a decent vegetarian food choice!

[fifitot]

Have just come back from a weekend away and then 2 day course with work. Therefore ate a hotel for meals - both expensive hotels I might add.

Now am a longstanding vegetarian, I am not expecting a green gourmet style veggie feast for my tea every night, I recognise there are limitations on hotel kitchens etc. However I get fed up of bloody pasta every time!

There were only 2 veggy things on the whole menu at one of the hotels so rotated between pasta and salad!

One hotel had a set evening menu and for your £25, if you ate meat or fish, this was great value. However for the same price I basically got given pasta and tomato sauce - probably cost less than a quid to make.

Some places are better than others and will cook you something if you ask but lots won't and helpfully point out the salmon or other fish on the menu.

Just a little bit of imagination please!

Goats cheese tart
(so bloody sick of it)
We are veggie on Tuesdays and I've got a wide range of veg meals, indian meals particularly delicious
Meals out are usually rubbish

I'm not a veggie but agree that some places are deplorable. Three of my colleagues are vegetarians and one is vegan - at the last team building day we got a choice of four mains. The veggies got (just for a change) pasta & tomato sauce and the vegan girl got cous cous with roast peppers.

Yes - goats cheese, that's the other one! In fact am pregnant so can't eat that anyway which didn't help!

Even if they made up a nice curry or goulash and froze it, I would be happier with that than bloody pasta yet again.

Even the kids menu had only pizza as a veggie choice and no beans - DD was gutted!

YANBU

We went to Dartmouth for a night away recently (just me and DP, no children).

I'm veggie, DP isn't.

I'm not joking, every bloody restaurant had, as their veggie option, Mushroom Risotto.
Its as if the local restaurateurs got together at their annual meeting and agreed that that should be the only veggie dish available in the whole of Dartmouth.

Also, they were charging up to £15 a time....for a plate of what is essentially rice and mushrooms and little else

urgh, yeah, mushroom risotto!

i don't like rice.

it's always something ridiculously different, too, the meat eaters get their veg and potatoes ans their meat and we get stuck with pasta in sauce (not even lumps of veg in the sauce)

then they come round with their parmesan: it's not vegetarian, silly people!

Glad am not alone! Looking forward to some nice veggies and some kind of curry tonight that DH will make me.

I don't mind mushroom risotto (if its done well) but TBH if I'm going out for a meal I expect something a bit more elaborate and more exciting than that.

Also, like you say nickelbabe, the meateaters often get various things on their plate and we end up with a plate of one thing/one texture, no variety.

We're off to France in June so I've been avoiding goats cheese for ages because I know that I will probably end up eating it every day that we're there. Last time we went I was so sick of it afterwards that I didn't touch it for a year or so!

I happen to love mushroom risotto as for the life of me I can't cook risottos!

But I do agree that the veggie options are always over expensive for what they are.

And don't you just love asking what's available for vegetarians only to be asked 'do you eat fish?'

fifitot - you can eat goat's cheese. You can't eat unpasteurised cheese.

I think it depends on what kind of goats cheese it is doesn't it? Some chervil has a rind and you can't eat it. I asked the question of it once, was it unpasteurised, in a restaurant and tbh they didn't know - so then to avoid the risk these days.

cheese salad
mushroom risotto
onion tart
pasta with mushroom/tomato sauce
yawn....

Norbert - I usually live on omlette and chips in France (this is the place where one waiter maintained that he didn't know what a vegetarian was. I even pointed out the word in my dictionary. So I started "don't eat fish, don't eat meat, don't eat chicken...". What I actually got was a large plate of assorted sausages). The problem when you go to mainland Europe is that they don't seem to have the variety of restaurants that we have here (every town has a chinese, Indian, Italian, 'modern'... also not too hard to find Greek, Japanese, French.....)

France is bad for veggie food isn't it. I quite like omlette and crepes but a week of it is just no good! Greece, Spain and Italy have lots of vegetable dishes so it's never really a struggle on holiday I find. In Italy they went out of their way to give me grilled courgettes and stuffed vegetables and lovely sauces etc.

Had to laugh at getting sausages in France!

Like I said in the opening post, it really isn't difficult to make something quick and tasty I just think they don't have the imagination.

One night last week the 'chef' made me vegetable fricasee. I was scared to ask what it was but it was essentially chopped up courgettes and red onion in cream with a bit of rocket on the top - truly horrid.

Actually... the worst place I ever went to for veggie food was......... Italy (up in the North near Germany)! I think I was actually served over-boiled pasta with Kraft cheese trianglkes melted onto the top (but it had sunk to the bottom in a big lump). Russia wasn't great either (although I do actually like the potato and cabbage dishes so I managed to eat better than the carnivores).

YANBU!
I totally agree. And Bruschetta. So many times I get stuck eating chopped tomato on a loaf of bread and a bit of basil.
The worst was when I went out for dinner for DH's work do. There was not one vegetarian thing. Not a green salad. Not pasta. And certainly not a mushroom risotto.
So DH's boss asked the waiter. They huffed and puffed and finally agreed that they suppposed they could make me something.
They brought out an avocado. I kid you not.
It was very artistically arranged in a fan shape on the plate, but that's all it was. An avo bloody cado.

I hate avocado so would have been very hungry (and very cross) that night !

wahwahwah -aah yes, omelettes. How could I forget the many, many omelettes I consumed? In fact I think it was probably omelette every lunch time (when we ate out) and something involving goats cheese every evening in the chambre d'hotes.

Not good for your digestive system though

A coiple of years ago when we went to Ile de Re we played safe and self-catered most of the time. However we did go out to a very expensive restaurant with the in-laws. The veggie meal (they'd booked this in advance and warned them that there would be a veggie so not a sudden surprise to them) turned out to be a plate of veg swimming in drizzled with olive oil and loads of rock salt sprinkled over it

Don't come to Brisbane if you are vegetarian (I am)
Pasta or rice or disgusting thick cheese filled pizzas.
I think I've gone off pizzas for life (and I used to love a Pizza Express one)

I think most of Europe is terrible for being a vegetarian - it is omelette, chips and salad wherever you go. I usually end up so gummed up from all the eggs I don't shit till I'm back on home turf.

And England isn't great, I frequently have to go to 5 or 6 restaurants before I can find something I will eat (one veggie choice v. 20 or 30 meaty choices!). The fact that I can't bear mushrooms, nuts or goats cheese rules out about 99% of veggie meals when eating out!

Tis shite. I beleive eating out as a veggie is what it was like for anyone eating out in the 70's; RUBBISH. Give it 30 years, they'll catch up.

So what would you like to see on the menu?

Thai things, Mexican things, Indian things, anythings that aren't lasagne!

what thai dishes? what Mexican dishes? what Indian dishes?

What is wrong with italian foods?

YANBU, I have given up hope on being offered anything comparable to the types of non-vegetarian meals in terms of cooking imagination/skill/value considering ingredients. What I almost always do is order a selection of side order vegetables, checking that they're not cooked in meat stock (usually are in France). This way I don't pay over the odds for a load of vegetables, and don't end up with one big plate of the same old pasta/risotto/stodge.

An exception is Wagamama, which I find has a good selection of foods owing to its use of tofu to create a variety of dishes.

Agree re: hotels, if you're paying good money they should certainly offer something that represents value for money. However, what's your policy when having people over for dinner? always suspect of veggies for their logic that if they come to you for dinner you should prepare a veggie meal for them, yet when you go to them they don't prepare a meat dish for you.

reminds me of this

www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKTsWjbjQ8E

Nothing's wrong with Italian food. It's just really depressing to get a plate of substandard risotto or pasta and tomato sauce when everyone else has something interesting to eat.

I get fed up of roasted vegetables everywhere. Roast vegetable lasagne, roast vegetables and cheese in a sandwich...oh joy.

Nothing wrong with Italian foods, but pasta in a tomato sauce seems to come up time and time again, and it's something that takes 10 minutes to cook at home on the days when you can't be bothered to cook, so when it's the only option at a restaurant it's a bit [yawn].

Thai restaurants seem to do quite well, like Wagamama's does, because they use tofu and often have plenty of vegetable based curries with sweet and sour sauce or some other variation. Does irritate me when places put prawn crackers on your 'vegetarian' dish though. And makes me wonder what happens in the kitchen...