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

would put it on a totally different spiritual and culinary plane. I didn’t love what I ate there, simply because the food suffered mightily from the limitations of the vegan diet, but I did find the cooking impressive.

I approached Hangawi warily, because like most Americans, I find Korean cuisine a little too unconventional, with its emphasis on steam-ing, marinating, and casseroles that aren’t anything like the ones our mothers made. I yanked open the imposing outer door to the restau-F O R K I T O V E R

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rant and entered a tiny anteroom. Then I had a choice to make: go forward or flee. To commit to a meal at Hangawi takes courage, for the staff confiscates your shoes, and then there is no escape. On the other hand, the polished wood floor feels really good under stocking feet.

Joining me for this meal was the vegan who fell prey to her yoga instructor. She seemed in a pleasant enough mood, particularly for a vegan, although she complained of not having had sufficient time to enjoy her usual predinner massage. She told me she’d had some really good falafel for lunch. This is how vegans normally begin a meal, by reciting the details of their previous one, a side effect of a near starvation diet. The room, appropriately serene, had polished wood tables, screens, and lots of pots and ceramics. The music was mostly that Eastern-style wailing that sounds like a soprano holding a high note.

As an aperitif, we tasted two drinks she recommended, cold pine-tree juice and hot citron-paste tea. Both were indeed delicious, and both were insanely sweet, which brings me to my fourth category of vegan cuisine: Shockingly Sweet. With no animal fat permitted in the diet and surprisingly few fried foods on menus, vegans seem to obtain almost all their pleasure from sweetness. Much of the food I sampled at Hangawi went directly to the gratification of that craving. The best dish, as it should have been, was a $29.95 plate of wild matsutaki mushrooms grilled over pine needles; the mushrooms had a clean, woodsy, earthy flavor, although I doubt they detoxified me, as promised. Vegans seem to believe that every bite they take has an immediate physiological effect on the body, while we everyday omnivores understand that it takes decades of burgers and fries to really mess us up.

My Date with a Vegan

She wore a dress with spaghetti straps, quite elegant by vegan standards, in the photo that appeared in the personals section of the Veggie Singles News. I wrote to her, suggesting lunch. She responded, recommend-ing Zenith Vegetarian Cuisine, a vegan restaurant in the Hell’s Kitchen section of Manhattan. Actually, any restaurant dishing up vegan food is Hell’s Kitchen to me.

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A L A N R I C H M A N

She looked lovely, head to toe. Well, maybe not her toes, since they were encased in vegan-sanctioned Payless nonleather shoes. She told me she had been on three previous dates with men who had answered her singles ad, and all of them had turned out to be vegetarians, not vegans. I was relieved to learn that there are not as many vegans out there as I had feared.

She told me she was twenty-nine, worked as a corporate travel agent, and lived in Queens with her eight-year-old daughter, who adores Chicken McNuggets. That’s as lax a brand of family veganism as I’ve ever come across. She told me she didn’t get along with the first vegetarian because he was too macho and insisted on paying for the meal.

“We went out to shoot pool after dinner and I won,” she said. “That didn’t go over too well.” She said she didn’t get along with the second man because of his attitude. When they got to the restaurant and she asked him where he wanted to sit, he replied, “On your lap.” I agreed that was an inappropriate comment for vegans and vegetarians alike.

She said he was an Israeli.

I told her that was a pretty typical comment for an Israeli.

Her third date was the most promising, but the budding relationship stalled when he started lecturing her on the breakdown of the American family, how every household needs a man. This is not an approach recommended to anyone attempting to charm a woman who is a single parent.

I wished her the best of luck in future dating endeavors and warned her about the seductive powers of the vegan yoga instructors she was certain to meet. She promised she would ask my advice before she ever went out with a “crazy nut-job yoga instructor.” I had done my duty. If I can save even one woman from one of them, I will have left the vegan world a better place.

As long as there have been vegans, I have looked upon them as persons with whom I would not want to break bread—actually, one bite of the F O R K I T O V E R

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revoltingly dry corn bread at Angelica Kitchen should be enough to make even vegans not want to break bread with vegans.

I have now changed my mind. I had a lovely lunch with the woman who placed her advertisement in the Veggie Single News and would eat with her again, as long as she didn’t order the “eggplant chips” at Zenith. I had a nice dinner with my friend at Hangawi, but she was my friend before turning to veganism and so we could talk about the old days, before her life centered around tofu.

I’m not even certain any longer that vegans are the worst people who have ever lived. After all, Adolf Hitler was merely a vegetarian.

GQ, april 1999

S H E E P T H R I L L S

“Aye, I liked the old days,” said John Marsh, a fifty-year-old butcher dismayed by how genteel modern haggis-making has become. He picked a