A Vegan Called Bacon

Meat-free restaurants don’t usually span a very wide range.  At one end it’s an earthenware bowl of earthy, nutty, lumpy splodge, served with a nutty crust and some earth.  At the other end, it’s big white plates, dotted with vegetarian versions of classic British favourites (i.e. things we borrowed from other countries in the early 90s): something Asian with the rice in a pretty pile, or roasted things with peppery leaves and a balsamic reduction.

All of which can be very tasty, but all of which I’ll make at home some time or other.  So I was hopping from foot to foot and squealing a little bit when we decided to go to Saf, a vegan restaurant that does the contemporary cuisine thing: little fiddly towers of things I don’t normally eat, plated with smears of contrived juice I’d never bother to make myself.

When we arrived, the place was all mood lighting and elegant furniture, and packed with Shoreditch’s finest.  (For the benefit of non-Londoners, this means beautiful people, with surprising haircuts and serious spectacles).  It looked very clean and a little bit special.  Which, being nothing like our kitchen, is a good prelude to getting food I wouldn’t get at home.

First of all, we were presented with a fancy cocktail list.  It’s extensive and exciting, and nearly makes you drunk reading it.  (That, combined with the dim lighting means my photos are rubbish).  Unfortunately, we had to wait nearly 30 minutes for them, after which a lot of the hand-rubbing anticipation had worn off.  Kim’s Mojito Rosa (a mojito with sour cherry infused rum) was the best – still recognisably a mojito, but you could really taste the cherry.  My Jasmine Pearl Martini, however, pretty much tasted like a Martini.  Overall, these cocktails were very good, though not really as excitingly different as their names would suggest.

We loved our starters.  The raw butterbean hummus was creamy and the wafers of bread were crunchy.  The gazpacho (above) was very interesting: it involved tomato, red onion, and melon, if I remember correctly.  It looked stunning, and tasted good.  Most exciting of all was what I assume to be something of a signature dish: cheese and caviar on biscuits.  The cheese was made of cashew nuts, the biscuits were raw and very, very crispy, and the caviar was introduced to us personally.  Apparently someone had injected some kind of fruit juice into some kind of seaweed-based jelly, thousands and thousands of times, to create these little clusters of wobbly balls.

The mains were definitely less unusual and exciting.  The best dish was the buckwheat risotto, which was creamy and had a lovely bite to it, was definitely something I might have made at home.  The Buddha Bowl (tofu, sambal, kimchee etc; below) was also excellent, but again, a disappointingly ordinary concept.

The two raw dishes we ate were the most exciting-sounding things, yet not so pleasant to eat.  A mushroom stack gave us a thrill of excitement followed by mild nausea, both feelings due to its profoundly mushroomy mushroomness.  You could just about manage half a forkful.  The lasagne, presented beautifully (in a stack, again) was a fairly unappetising mix of dull and similar earthy flavours, and was on the chewy side of chewy.

When it comes to desserts, I’m not so sure that novelty and interest are necessarily good things.  I guess Saf agrees, because the dessert menu was largely ordinary but delicious-sounding, and desserts turned out to be largely ordinary and delicious.  The ice cream was excellent and when the Ganache Tart was shared around, everyone make little moaning noises.  But, because I’m obsessed with novelty food, I stupidly went for the Superfood platter.  I can’t remember exactly what it involved any more, other than some goji berries made an appearance, but I can remember that it was a smorgasbord of tough, dry, dull, and sickly morsels.  (And some nice ice cream).

We finished with a pretty hefty bill, but to be fair, this was because we’d all got carried away with the booze.  The actual food, considering the work that’s gone into it, was pretty cheap.

Overall, the experience left me impressed, excited and cynical at the same time. A bit like the prospect of an Obama presidency.

On the one hand, exciting-sounding food often tasted disappointing, and the best tasting stuff was quite ordinary in concept.

On the other hand, it was wonderful to see absurdly elaborate food and drink, presented impeccably to a packed out venue of trendy-somethings, who were presumably either unaware or uninterested in the fact it was mostly-raw vegan.  Interestingly, most of the marketing literature calls it ‘botanical’ food; I am very happy with this because I’m increasingly uncomfortable with the label ‘vegan’, and what’s more, I doubt it would be so full if it was called “The Virtuous Vegan”.

In the end, the caviar and cheese dish is what really streams out rays of slivery light in my memory.  It made me think that taste and presentation are only two thirds of the ingredients of a really good meal.  The other third is a good story.  A hand-syringed drop of fruit juice encased in seaweed jelly makes me think of a bent-over, squinting, line cook, swearing under her breath about the smug scientific chef who came up with the bloody idea.  Caviar just makes me think of dead pregnant fish.

Before we went to Mongolia, someone told me that when I returned I would open my bag, and would be knocked over by a warm, greasy wind of gaseous mutton fat.

And experience did prove it to be a pretty counterveganistic culture.  I learned that there are traditionally two distinct food seasons in Mongolia: winter, the time of mutton in all its glorious variations; and summer, season of hard cheese and fermented mare’s milk.

In addition, we found that there were three types of food shop. One, a shop selling various semi-dried, fatty, meat and blood and gristle sausages and pickles. Two, a shop selling slightly rancid butter and a variety of dairy products heavily based on rancid butter. Three, a shop selling vegetables. The vegetables they sell are mostly limited to cabbage, carrot, and potato.  Sometimes you got a kind of supermarket with all three shops rolled into one.  (In fairness, there was a State Department Store with a decent range of stuff, and one OK market, too)

For lunch on our first day, I had a plate of grated carrots, and Kim had two fried eggs. By this point we were starting to feel a bit down about the food.

But then I actually bothered to do some research on the internet, and found a wild claim of FIVE vegetarian restaurants in Ulaan Bataar! And I found a website with them pinpointed on a Google Map, too!

The first we tracked down was the MARS cafe, a slightly grimy old cafe hidden at the back of the third floor of a run-down clothes market.  Everything was written in Mongolian, but I did enough sign language to assure myself it was vegetarian. We ordered a plate of something or other (”looks like little poos” said Kim) by pointing at a photo. I asked them if they minded me watching them cooking it, and it turned out to be a sauce of tomato ketchup and water, thickened with flour, and seasoned with powdery white stuff (I assume sugar and salt). Then a bunch of soya balls were boiled in it, and it was served with salad and rice.  It was hardly amazing but I guess at least it was authentically Mongolian-ish. I was delighted. We ate it while a huge photo of a lady decked out like the Virgin Mary gazed benignly down upon us.

We were puzzled as to how veggie food could appear in such an unlikely location. Later in the day, we visited another vegetarian restaurant (and vegan/vegetarian tour agency) called Luna Blanca (we ordered take-out tofu and satay ‘chicken’.)  While we waited we chatted to the staff, and it emerged that they are vegetarians and vegans because they are practitioners of what they called “Quinin“. They said it was a form of meditation, but I couldn’t get a clear idea of what it was all about. That is, until I saw some leaflets with a woman decked out in some fancy regalia, entitled ‘The Supreme Master Ching Hai’.

Whom I recognised as the Virgin Mary from the Mars Cafe (there she is, above).

Clearly something strange is afoot in Mongolia.  A scary-looking person who looks like a slim Imelda Marcos is promoting vegetarianism in the land of meat and milk. Oh, if only we could have a million Supreme Masters to rescue and love all the dogs that abound! We later found out another new age guru and promoter of vegetarianism, Shri Shri Ravi Shankar, is also popular here.

In any case, thanks to the Supreme Master and her followers, I managed to have some amazingly delicious Mongolian-style dumplings, which were big and fat and stuffed with fried cabbage and carrot (and some unecessary TVP chunks). I also tried a Mongolian soup (rather bland); doughy noodles (traditional but not really my thing); a stir fry containing potato chips, mushrooms, pepper and TVP which reminded me of Peruvian Lomo Saltado; and a borscht (delicious).

But still, it made me uneasy.  I don’t want people to be veggie just because The Supreme Master tells them so. However much I like her camp outfits and culty internet TV channel, once people realise she’s a complete fraud, won’t they start to think being veggie might just be a thing for campy, imperious, culty wierdies?

Come to think of it…

Thanks to the excellent Beijingveg.com website, during our five weeks in Beijing we were able to amass enough mock meats to satisfy any gluten glutton.

Pure Lotus is supposed by most listings magazines to be the best vegetarian restaurant in Beijing. We found the food quite good, but the way it was served was distracting. The menus are the size of small tombstones and as easy to hold. The dishes have names like “grand swallow nose treasure hot hot cold cold.” (I made that up but they honestly were that silly). And the serving dishes were enormous splats of porcelain, with design features like big holes in the side through which scalding hot liquids could pour.

The vegetable dishes were disappointing, but the mock meats were pretty good. This was where we had the most delicious mock fish we’ve tasted: a soft, flakey ‘meat’, with a thick ’skin’ of pleasantly chewy seaweed, served steaming hot, in a delicious sweet, dark, bubbling sauce. The mock ribs were decent, but I wasn´t sure about the ´bones´. Having a bit of wood in my mouth just felt wierd. (Elsewhere we´ve had versions with edible ‘bones’ such as celery or lotus root. Much better.)

So, Pure Lotus, while it had some excellent dishes, was overrated, over priced, and silly. Having said that, I do agree with my friend Diana that the dry ice fruit at the end was good silly. And the teacups were cool.

My personal eating highlight in Beijing has been eating with the Vegan Social Club of Beijing at Still Thoughts. The food is reasonably priced, and there’s a good selection of dishes. I ‘m not sure it’s the best vegan food in Beijing; but eating in a group of 10 - 20 other veggies means you get to try pretty much everything on the menu. Highlights included a ‘crispy duck’ of fried tofu skin wrapped around dark, meaty mushrooms; large, soft, slightly spicy green peppers in a black bean sauce (something like a Chinese pimientos del padron); and long, thin aubergine, sliced crossways, with garlic and seitan stuffed between the slices. The green vegetables here were fresh and crunchy.

If that was my favourite eating experience, the restaurant that worked best without needing a big, fun crowd of fellow veggies was Bodhi Sake. It was in a beautiful setting: the courtyards and rooms of a Buddhist temple hung with lanterns and art. The menu had a good selection of vegetables and mock meats. The food was presented beautifully. We had the most memorable mock meat we’ve had yet: pork belly. It was served in an earthenware vessel on top of a bed of salty greens. The ‘belly’ was a type of gluten with a slightly smokey flavour; the ‘fat’ was konjac (or possibly rice-based) and melted in your mouth. We also had a delicious dish of long, dark, string shaped mushrooms, fried until nearly crispy.

As for my favourite individual dishes, the best greens we had were at Lotus in Moonlight. They also did a fantastic dish of tiny cubes of soft tofu, fried to a salty crisp on the outside, while keeping the inside silken.

My favourite mock duck was the duck at Beihe. It had a good savoury taste, a pleasant texture, and was served with celery instead of cucmber, which worked very well. I suspect the real reason I liked it so much was that it came in a comedy “duck” shape.

The best spicy dish was fish at the restaurant by the Big Bell temple. It blew my head off. I liked it so much I went back again on another visit to Beijing. It had a nice atmosphere (maybe a bit too dark though) and that dish was amazing. Also good was the little chunks of ‘lamb’. The place was hard to find, but fantastic value and really tasty.

An honourable mention goes to Cat restaurant, which to my knowledge is the only organic vegetarian restaurant in Beijing. They spoke great English, were incredibly friendly, and served the freshest vegetables I had.

A finally, a dishonourable mention to Gong De Lin. It is often mentioned in guidebooks as thir token vegetarian restaurant, but I have no idea why. It was without doubt the worst meal we’ve had in a Chinese vegetarian restaurant - for example, a mock fish which was a lump of mashed potato with a gluey coating, in a pool of watered down tomato ketchup. Don’t go!

I’m missing Beijing. It´s an interesting city, and a great place to be vegan.