Hi gang!
Hope you’re all doing alright. Mum’s taking the reins this time, something food related for you!
So, Ellie is a vegetarian, edging on vegan – eats dairy and eggs at the moment…. With the help of a variety of new cookery books that I added to my collection, I dealt with ‘at home feeding’, in fact I quite enjoyed the challenge. Eating out though was a different matter! Finding somewhere that allowed all of us to have a meal we’d enjoy (or indeed could eat) proved tricky to say the least.
From experience, the restaurant sector is not responding terribly well to the rise in veganism or those choosing to avoid fish as well as meat. Finding somewhere for all of us to eat has required a lot of investigation ahead of making a booking and even with that, meals have often been disappointing. Younger age groups are reportedly seeking more vegan and vegetarian options on menus, with these groups also the most likely to report eating out and to class themselves as ‘foodies’- so is the sector missing a trick?
The efforts of the retail/food production sector are clearly evident, with many more vegetarian and vegan/plant-based foods appearing on the shelves. ’Plant-based’ is the preferred term, avoiding the negative connotations of ‘bland’ and ‘boring’ attached to vegan offerings. The response of the restaurant sector has, however, to date, been extremely variable, especially outside of fast food and high street restaurant brands (some of which do offer vegetarian and vegan menus - for instance, the Ivy Brasserie and Pizza Express). A scan of menus shows vegetarians are now reasonably well-catered for, with some interesting dishes (even some Michelin-starred restaurants now have a vegetarian menu). Having said that, recently Ellie was limited to one vegetarian starter and one vegetarian main (‘Oh well, I guess I’m having that’), and overall the vegetarian options on menus tend to be quite repetitive (there are only so many tomato and mozzarella/burrata salads you can eat, or risottos for that matter!). For vegans, however, it is a different story – with the majority of restaurants not offering vegan alternatives at all. Is it so difficult? On a recent trip to North Wales I was surprised to find a vegan menu available in one restaurant – the vegan customers using it were delighted to ‘have so much choice’, Ellie when I sent it to her, described the menu as ‘exciting’, so it can be done. It certainly takes a bit of creativity but is a challenge any decent chef should be well-equipped to take on. So come on all you chefs – get those creative juices flowing and let vegetarians/vegans and omnivores have the pleasure of eating out together.
(Ellie's back!)
This is something that always irritates me, having 1 choice, or no choice (I’ve had a dinner of side dishes before, which actually often works out cheaper). Sometimes menus don’t actually say if something is fully vegetarian, they just list it with all the other meals without the shining beacon of hope that the ‘V’ or ‘Ve’ provides.
I'm even more awkward as I don’t like meat-like substitutes, I had ‘vegan meatballs’ in a pub a few weeks back and I still don’t feel completely right, also I got 4 meatballs and it cost £13 which is just disgusting! I am happy that the craze of just shoving a massive mushroom in a bun and calling it a burger has died though.
Are you veggie? Gluten free? How do you find eating out?
Thanks for reading lads, what else do you want to see from Mum?
Laterzzzzz,
Anita and Ellie x
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