Vegetarian Frustrations, Vegetarian Solutions
By FRANK BRUNI
TAGS: INDIAN, MANHATTAN, VEGETABLES
A dish of fried spinach with chaat at Devi. (Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times)
One of my companions at a recent dinner is vegetarian, and early in the meal, she asked me if she could bend my ear about one of the constant frustrations she faces when dining out.
I was sure I knew what she was about to say. She was going to bemoan the use of chicken stock in sauces on dishes that, as described on the menu, appeared to be vegetarian-friendly.
She was going to lament the current prevalence of bacon in the sorts of dishes that, once upon a time, might have been meatless.
Wrong. And wrong. She wanted to tell me about something else that I hadn’t truly considered before, and that understandably upsets her.
She noted that time and again, when she goes to a fancy restaurant that has a prix fixe menu — x number of courses for y number of dollars — she finds that not a single one of the choices for the savory courses is truly vegetarian.
She asks if the kitchen can come up with something for her, and the kitchen will perhaps muster a simple mixed salad for a first course and a plate of pasta with mixed vegetables for a second course. Nothing better or more fanciful than that.
Then the bill comes, and she’s been charged the same amount as the person at the table who had a main course of squab and the person at the table who had a starter of peekytoe crab.
Is that fair?
Some people might argue that it is: that the restaurant isn’t responsible for her choice of a more restricted diet and that she could have chosen a restaurant without a prix fixe menu and/or with more vegetarian options at the ready.
And yet: dining out is often a group endeavor, in which one or more members of the group don’t have full say in the destination, and shouldn’t a restaurant want anyone coming through the door to leave feeling as graciously and fairly accommodated as possible? And is vegetarianism really such an exotic, unforeseeable thing?
I’d welcome readers’ opinions. Meantime, I’d like to offer a few bits of guidance and words of warning for vegetarians who are headed out to eat, or for people who are heading out to eat with vegetarians.
First the warning: ask about how the dish you’re tempted to order is made. Sometimes the method thwarts vegetarian intentions.
To give you an example (and to move beyond true vegetarianism to a diet that permits fish but not poultry or red meat), more than a few restaurants try to coax maximal tenderness from a fillet of, say, salmon, by poaching it in duck fat. The menu won’t tell you that. And your server probably won’t think to volunteer that fact unless you mention, when ordering the fish, that you don’t eat meat, and grill him or her about the way the fish is cooked.
As for advice, two genres of restaurant that often work well for groups with a mix of meat eaters and vegetarians are Indian and Italian. Italian restaurants often have pasta dishes with no meat, and those dishes sometimes receive as much of the restaurant’s attention, and reflect as much of the restaurant’s pride, as any of the other dishes do.
Of course meatless dishes have an even more honored, special place in Indian cuisine. And where I dined with the companion mentioned at the beginning of this post was Devi, perhaps the city’s best Indian restaurant. We had no trouble finding vegetarian dishes that she could eat and that the rest of us wanted to try as well. (We were doing a sort of family-style, share-everything meal.)
To digress for a bit, Devi went through some turbulence late last summer, with the owner deciding to close the place and the two men in charge of the food, Suvir Saran and Hemant Mathur, buying the restaurant from him just weeks after it shut.
You can relive the saga by checking out an “Off the Menu” item in the Times by Florence Fabricant, a post on this blog by me and then a subsequent post by Nick Fox.
In any case, Devi survived, and the Devi I visited after the changeover in ownership remained a significantly appealing place. It looks largely the same. And the menu is familiar, though more than a dozen new dishes have been added. They come straight from a cookbook by Mr. Saran, “American Masala,” that was published late last year.
I tried and liked several of these, including seafood and crab croquettes with a pickled-green-chile mayonnaise, and masala schnitzel, a quasi-Asian, quasi-Italian spin on pounded, breaded chicken cutlets. The chicken is marinated in a mixture including cilantro, ginger, mint and cayenne before being coated with Parmesan and panko.
On the vegetarian front, the menu on the night we visited Devi had no fewer than seven vegetarian main courses, and that was in addition to more than a half dozen vegetarian options in the categories for appetizers, rice, bread and sides, including the restaurant’s beloved Manchurian cauliflower, which tastes like cauliflower in ketchup. That’s a good thing.
And the vegetarian in my group didn’t feel like a second-class citizen who had to be content with the hurried, grudging improvisations of a kitchen that hadn’t counted on the likes of her.
Devi, 8 East 18th Street; (212) 691-1300. Dinner appetizers, $6 to $12. Entrees, $15 to $30.
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