Fork It Over The Intrepid Adventures of a Professional Eater-Mantesh by Unknown (rm book recommendations .TXT) 📕

She did not pepper-spray him. She went over and thanked him for his foot massage. She fell for the whole thing. Not long afterward, he told her she was the woman he was destined to marry. On their first date, they went to Zen Palate, where, she recalls dreamily, “We had some really good tofu with black-bean sauce.” They now live together.

It must be good to be a vegan yoga instructor, roughly comparable to being a drummer in a rock band.

While sitting in Angelica Kitchen, an immensely popular restaurant that must gross more money than Lutèce, I said the three little words I never expected to say in a vegan restaurant. I turned to my friends and announced, “This is delicious.” I was eating marinated tofu on mixed-grain bread. The bread was an unhealthy-looking speckled brown, and while I dislike indiscriminate speckles in my food, the bread was fresh, which is not all that common in vegan restaurants. The tofu was doing no harm, which is all I ever ask of that product, the roasted carrots added a sweet crunch, and the parsley-almond pesto was vibrant. Vibrant is another word I never expected to utter in a vegan restaurant. I was almost as pleased with the soup of the day, split-pea that could not have tasted better had a beef bone been used for the stock. In my newly devised four-tier classification of vegan food, I rated both the sandwich and the soup Worth Ordering Again.

I was never quite as satisfied with anything else at Angelica Kitchen.

Let me put it more precisely: I hated everything else.

I want to be fair about this. Nobody is more close-minded than me when it comes to vegetarian cuisine, regardless of whether it’s vegan, macrobiotic, or vegetarian. I think vegetarian restaurants generally prepare vegetables worse than nonvegetarian restaurants. Vegetarian restaurants have little respect for the individual properties of their ingredients, only a realization that one takes longer to get soft than another. I’ve always suspected that vegetarian chefs toss their turnips, potatoes, and F O R K I T O V E R

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cabbage into the same pot and follow a one-line recipe that reads: “Turn up the heat.”

I find vegetarian restaurants both smug and culinarily unsuccessful.

Still, I have always been inclined to allow vegetarians to go about their business without interference from me. But I don’t feel quite the same about vegans. What infuriates me about them is their self-righteousness, their insistence that we miscreants give up our enjoyment of food and eat what they eat. I set out to determine if their dogma made any sense at all, if I was mistaken about the inferiority of their cuisine. To do that, I decided to eat at three of the most esteemed vegan restaurants in New York—the aforementioned Angelica Kitchen; the branch of Zen Palate located on Ninth Avenue; and Hangawi, in Midtown.

Angelica Kitchen is something of a vegetarian cliché, with insufficient room between the plain, varnished-wood tables, place settings that include chopsticks for no good reason, a friendly but ineffectual staff that might well have trained on some alien plant world, and all the staples one would expect—carrot juice, sesame sauce, miso soup, mulled apple cider, and the like. Near the entrance is a community help board offering assistance with the essentials of life, such as channeling, massage, and meditation, and a lot of notices promising rewards for the return of lost animals. Vegans seem to lose more than their share of cats.

After Worth Ordering Again, my next vegan gastronomic rating is Just Plain Bad. In that classification I place Angelica Kitchen’s three-bean chili, one of those profoundly unsuccessful attempts to make a dish that ordinarily relies on meat taste as though the meat isn’t missed.

Also Just Plain Bad was the overly spiced, overly smooth humus served with a lump of cauliflower plopped in it, a carrot-apple juice melding two incompatible flavors, and a translucent fruit-and-gelatin parfait that looked like baby food but would frighten any child who tasted it.

Making my third vegan category, Bad Beyond Belief, was a “daily seasonal special” called Scary, Posh, Baby & Sporty. It had lots of everything, including tofu sour cream, yellowed cauliflower, gnarled radishes, and what seemed to be weeds. On a second visit, my special of “baked 2 4 8

A L A N R I C H M A N

ginger tofu triangles with udon noodles in a silky peanut sauce” arrived with sweet potatoes, broccoli, kimchi, mizuna, peanuts, and sesame seeds but without the tofu. In real cooking, unlike vegan cooking, main ingredients seldom if ever are forgotten by the kitchen.

If Angelica Kitchen satisfies the repressed hippie yearnings of the vegan community, then Zen Palate addresses a different psychological need, a longing to connect with the mystical East. The decor of the Ninth Avenue branch is surprisingly trendy, with oversize sconces, sponged walls, and dimmed lights, but any decorative effort is overwhelmed by a drab, indifferent staff. The kitchen is determined to cook food quickly rather than well, and the outerwear of customers is strewn about, making the place look like a suburban rec room on NFL

game day.

I ate one dish Worth Ordering Again, a plate of delicate ravioli stuffed with a not unpleasant mixture of soy protein, bamboo shoots, and snow peas and topped with a subdued sesame-wasabi sauce. Very nearly Worth Ordering Again, but I wouldn’t, were the “sizzling medallions,” which I liked until the monotonous texture of the chewy little orange-flavored wheat-gluten blobs tired me out. Bad Beyond Belief were cardboard-like scallion pancakes with no scallion taste, pan-fried vegetable dumplings filled with a repugnant brown mash, and a dish called Dreamland. I thought Dreamland had promise. It contained deep-fried linguine, black mushrooms, and marinated ginger. This dish severely tested my karma, because after a single bite, I wanted to throw it across the room.

Hangawi, a Korean vegan restaurant, turned out to be so much more admirable than the other two places that I