Don't You Know, Talkin' 'Bout a Vegan-o-lution

Tel Aviv is a mecca for vegan food. This seems to me a bit overstated, since there are very very few restaurants here devoted solely to vegan fare. But as my daughter reminds me, you can find vegan dishes on virtually every menu in the City. And so for her, that’s quite satisfactory.

I suppose I see the same thing in our soul food kitchen. The menu is obviously not vegan, but we do have a fairly large set of vegan dishes. And more and more, our guests are ordering vegan. To the point where a fairly significant portion of our test kitchen dishes are now vegan. I probably try out 3 to 5 new vegan dishes here every week, and, while most never make it onto our menu, a good many of them are served up each week as part of our Chef’s Choice series. We even have a Vegan Lover’s picnic basket for two which we have just launched. We’ll see how it does.

But the Vegan-o-lution I am referring to in the title of this post has much less to to with what’s happening “OUT THERE,” and much more to do with what’s happening within. Basic sauces and stocks are now being prepared as vegan bases, a simple but obvious move if you want a particular sauce, say remoulade, to work for vegans and non-vegans alike. We only have so much “real estate” in our refrigerators and creating vegan and non-vegan versions of various sauces simply takes up too much space. And the end result of creating one for both is not only more efficient, it’s also (in general) the healthier alternative.

So if you know the board game Risk, and if you can imagine our refrigerators and freezers as comprising a map of the world, what you would see is that, slowly but surely, the vegan “pieces on the board” are quietly taking over the world. Interesting phenomenon. Stay tuned.