Tuesday, July 6, 2010

Substituting on Restaurant Menus to Accomodate Vegan Diet

It is getting easier and easier to be a vegan and go to almost any restaurant! All you have to do is read the menu carefully and come up with your own creative solutions.

For example, if the restaurant has nothing on the menu that is vegan (and in many cases a restaurant's vegetarian food is loaded with cream or cheese), just carefully look at everything they do have on the menu. Choose some of the ingredients that would work for your diet (items that are more healthy) and ask them to substitute "this for that."

For example, they might feature broccoli or asparagus in a meat dish but not on their vegetarian menu, and for vegetarians they offer pasta "Alfredo." Ask the waiter if the cook would eliminate the cream and cheese from the Alfredo dish, add some olive oil, broccoli and asparagus.

Lately I have been ordering salads without the Feta cheese, pizzas without the cheese, etc. When asking to eliminate the cheese, why not ask if something else (healthy) could be added? For example, if you see artichokes on the menu, ask if you could have artichokes on your pizza instead of cheese.

It just gets easier and easier .......

Best wishes, dear friends. Bonnie

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hello,Bonnie. Yeap, you are right. Being vegetarian can be very flexible. In the past, i always complained that it's hard to get vegetarian food.but i now have discovered that we as the customer, have the right to make polite request.Now, my problem is solved. thanks for your guidance all this long. happy to be vegetarian.

youngbon said...

We are definitely on the same page, Strawberry Gal! By the way -- cute name :)

Bridget said...

While there are still people out there that ridicule vegans, more and more there are people, businesses, and manufacturers that are getting on the vegan bandwagon. While that does make life easier in some ways, the sneaky people just trying to make a fast buck make reading labels even more important than ever before! But I agree 100% that restaurants are much more open to working with the vegan at the table.