What's the oddest Vegan dish you've ever been served?

[HangingOver]

While I'm used to having dishes with certain ingredients removed and paying more for alternatives, yesterday took the biccie.

Restaurant was offering half price pizzas on a Monday night... they had one vegan option on their 'alternative' menu. On closer inspection it's just a vegetarian one without any cheese, but no biggy, I was hoping they might throw some nooch or sauce on it. They didn't... and as there was almost no tomato sauce on it either, all the bits of vegetables just fell straight off and it was really dry.

But that's not even what bothered me really... the main point was the vegan option was NOT HALF PRICE. I got to pay double what everyone else did for the privilege of having less stuff on my pizza 🙃

What's your most bizarre experience?

Traditional Greek food was very common in Greece even 30 years ago (not the hummus - that's not Greek).

You do have to check the veg though, because it can be cooked in pork fat.

Singapore airlines served me a raw red pepper stuffed with cold rice.
I ate the bread roll and the crackers.

Worst vegan option I've been served was a roll (dry, as rolls on planes tend to be, and with no spread) and a bag of cassava chips (chicken flavour - with real chicken) as the entirety of the food on a 10 hour flight. Thanks, Delta.

Oddest meal was when I still ate dairy and was veggie rather than vegan. Big, posh dinner for a press launch of a rather expensive product in France. 'In France' is never a promising setting for a food-based story but in this case they truly excelled themselves. The main course was some sort of steak or chop thing in a mushroom sauce. I was presented with a plate containing ... a spoonful of sauce. And a sprig of parsley.

Presumably had I been vegan I would have got only the parsley.

Not the worst meal I've had but the last time I flew long haul in 2019 (thank you covid and cost of living) British airways actually had a really decent vegan meal. I was genuinely surprised. Not sure if it's the same now, but thought it might be useful reading the stories of plane meals

Spaghetti still in the water it was cooked in with tomato ketchup. Add cheese if you were vegetarian. Came with a side salad. Newly post-communist Bulgaria didn't really understand veganism/vegetarianism. The one plus was everyone else at the restaurant ate the fish option and got horrendous food poisoning.

Oh, yes - I'd forgotten Bulgaria. Vegetable 'soup' that was a slice of tomato and 4 slices of carrot in literally an inch of warm sunflower oil.

Every October we go to a really posh Chairman's county cricket dinner. My DH is a vegetarian so he ticks this on invite. The year before last whilst we had steak he had a slow roasted carrot on a bed of Bejeweled cuscus. Last year whilst we had succulent lamb he had a cauliflower steak which was really just a lump of cauliflower with no sauce. We are just wondering what they will serve him up this October.

At a work dinner out in a fancy restaurant, a vegan colleague got given a broccoli 'steak' which was just a slice of slightly warmed broccoli and some decorative herbs on a side plate. Everyone else's meal was sumptuous.

I'm not vegan but tried a new vegan place (it didn't last long). They did the pretend meat thing. So I had 'smoked salmon' which was really finely sliced, pickled (?), acidic squidgy carrot and my friend had 'chicken' which was an undercooked abused potato. God loves a trier but I don't think anyone went back!

Literally a pile of vegetables on a plate. Most just chopped in half. Not even salt on them.

In a very expensive per head restaurant.

Was pregnant so couldn't even drink the good wine.

Rubbish evening and so expensive!!!

Shredded mooli in wholewheat pastry bags. Inedible.

After the horror of turnip crumble, I’m now at the stage of taking a tin of sweetcorn with me to ‘dinners’ in a bag.

How caterers/hosts can’t even manage a bowl of pickles and a moderately interesting salad of salad vegetables, olives, sweetcorn, grated carrot and croutons is one of life’s mysteries. You can get peppers, artichokes, capers and asparagus in bloody tins and jars ffs.

Stick a bread basket and some Flora next to it. Fruit salad to accompany.

A plate of warm cherry tomatoes about four years ago in a chain hotel at some function we attended.

At a fancy corporate works Christmas do I was served vegetable stock cube flavour soup, followed by vegetable risotto, which was…. More of the same soup with some rice mixed in.
iirc I stuck a bottle of table wine in my handbag and legged it before dessert came, got a pizza on the way home.

BA from Peru - Starter 3 cubes of melon. Main white rice and red lentils boiled without any flavourings Pud same as the starter. No roll or crackers. The meal was obviously designed to be not only Vegan but gluten free, dairy free, low salt etc etc. It was a long flight and I was starving. I now won’t pre order a special meal and I’ll take my chances eating the bits I want from a regular meal.
My husband’s ‘favourite’ was a plate of 3 whole carrots as a main course at a business lunch. He is no longer vegetarian. I think this ‘meal’ was the cause.

These are dishes that have been around since the year dot!

Finn Air - 4 Ryvitas and a kiwi fruit. - this was a good 25 years ago though. Was quite glad if this though when DM and the other chicken-meal-eaters I was travelling with started throwing up on the tube home.

Park Lane Hilton - industry awards dinner - half a roast cauliflower. No sauce, no spice, no side dishes. Just half a roast cauliflower, for everyone - veggie, vegan, religious reasons, allergies, whatever - who wasn't having the lamb shank and mash.

Oh goodness, these stories about Europe are taking me back. I moved abroad when I was a 16 year old vegetarian, and I was constantly fed pasta with some boiled vegetables and/or cheese. It was bloody awful! I still hate pasta now, almost 3 decades later.

Things are so much better now, although I did have a friend who had invited me for an apéro, and he was so pleased with this dip that he had spent ages making for me. It was delicious and I tucked in.

At the end, I asked him for the recipe and he wrote it down for me.

Only to discover it contained .... Parmesan! Argh!

(I still continue to make it, but with nooch)

Boiled Brussels sprouts with sweet lemon sauce as part of a set menu!

Actually that sounds luxurious compared to half a roasted cauli!!!

I’m vegetarian not vegan and I’ve usually found aeroplane food to be quite good. Usually you get the vegi food first and everyone looks envious.
The ANA flight to Tokyo had good main meals but it was slightly disappointing when they came around with the snacks. Everyone else got a tub of Pringles and we got a banana.

United flight to the US (so flight time was about 8 hours). I got a single Ryvita, with a single baby corn cut in half lengthways and laid on the top. No butter/spread, so dry as dust. Literally nothing else - no bread roll, no salad, no dessert. That was apparently the vegetarian/vegan/gluten free/halal/kosher/everything option (I’m not vegan).

I asked if I could have a bread roll or dessert as well, and the stewardess shouted at me “no you can NOT!” in a bizarrely aggressive way.

In 2014, we booked a Sunday lunch at a restaurant nearby that had been closed down for a while and had a massive, decadent revamp. They invited local people to book a half price lunch the week before their grand re-opening.
I phoned to book and asked what the veggie options were. They said they weren't sure yet but there would definitely be a veggie option.
The rest of my family all got very impressive looking Sunday roasts, topped with big, fluffy Yorkshires. Bowls of veg to share etc etc. Massive jug of gravy. All very promising.

Mine arrived...a plate of plain gnocchi. No sauce, not even a hint of seasoning. Just a flat plate, with about 40 plain gnocchi sliding about on it. It was definitely the most disappointed I've ever felt, food-wise!!

Oh and if we are talking about Europe, I remember multiple trips to Germany in the 80s/90s where we absolutely could not make people understand that we didn’t want diced Speck on our food (it was not the language barrier). “But Speck isn’t meat!”

Fine now! We go every year and the Speck obsession seems to have died down.

Sort of related to this.... but not entirely. But it's a funny story about my dear departed dad. In the 1989s he was working in Saudi Arabia. He travelled a lot for work but usually a few weeks at a time. This was a two year contract. He managed to wriggle out of his contract by slightly dodgy means after a few months and was on the plane home. Before take off there was a cabin announcement asking for him by name to make himself know to the cabin crew. Dad cautiously put his hand up, thinking that it had been nice having two hands.! "ah Mr Ibiza" says that stewardess, "please come with me". At this point Dad is praying to every god he can think of. They took him to the kitchen at the back of the plane and showed him some foil packets and said "we have a selection of vegetarian meals on board today, which would you like for lunch, and which would you like for dinner?".

I went to a friend's 50th birthday party - I was vegetarian at the time and she did know. I ended up eating a small portion of broccoli and carrots as that was the only thing that wasn't meat / cooked in goose fat! Couldn't eat the dessert either as it contained gelatin. I remember leaving the event and going home to have a peanut butter sandwich!