The New Stealth Vegetarian Restaurant

Meatless eateries strive to be crossover hits

By Lessley Anderson

When Sarma Melngailis and her former partner set out to open a raw, vegan restaurant in New York City’s Gramercy Park neighborhood, they knew they wanted the word wine in the name. They called it Pure Food and Wine, to broadcast that this was not a “crunchy granola café,” as Melngailis puts it, but rather a sophisticated, pleasure-centric dining spot.

Courtesy of Pure Food and Wine Inside Pure Food and Wine

No rainbow dream catchers, no liberal activist posters stapled to the walls of the bathroom, no mushy brown rice. Instead, it’s a dark, sexy space with pinkish-red seats and boho-chic staff members who are, for the most part, not vegan. Hiring vegans, Melngailis explains, might produce an atmosphere uncongenial to nonvegans. Sometimes, she says proudly, unsuspecting meat-eaters wander in for a cocktail and wind up staying for colorful, inventive dishes like Lapsang Smoked Portabella Mushroom with Caper Potato Salad.

Call it the stealth vegetarian restaurant. Pure is one of a new breed of meatless places trying to appeal to carnivores by consciously avoiding the stereotypes of what it means to be vegetarian. They don’t use using the words vegan or vegetarian on their menus, signs, or marketing materials (or if they do, the terms are in small print). They offer flavorful, creative dishes in trendy settings. They don’t mix politics with the food. And by positioning themselves as cool restaurants that just happen to serve vegetarian fare, they’re striving to be crossover hits, catering to people who no longer see meatless eating as a hippie lifestyle choice.

Five years ago, Jon Wisniewski, the Milwaukee-based brother of one of CHOW’s food editors, viewed tofu as “Whoa! Not eating that kind of thing.” Now, the hobbyist bodybuilder buys Morningstar Farms breakfast sausages and Boca burgers because “they’re supergood and lean.”

Veg Only, from High to Low

Napa, California’s Ubuntu restaurant offers “vegetable-inspired” dishes (translation: vegetarian) that are nearly as intensely flavored, elaborately plated, and expensive as those of Thomas Keller’s Per Se. A tiny cast iron pot is filled with creamy, roasted cauliflower,

Leaves and Things salad at Ubuntu Photographs by Chris Rochelle

The open kitchen at Ubuntu Photographs by Chris Rochelle

Ubuntu’s radishes with local chèvre Photographs by Chris Rochelle

Inside Napa’s Ubuntu Photographs by Chris Rochelle

Ubuntu’s vanilla bean “cheesecake” in a jar Photographs by Chris Rochelle

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and oxheart carrots are roasted and sliced like prime rib. In what some might consider the ultimate California fantasy, a yoga studio is perched in a loft above the dining room. There are wine tasting–yoga class combo deals, and rich-looking people with great bodies wander through the restaurant on their way to and from their practice. (There are loaner pashmina shawls available if you get cold going from class to glass.) It’s a place where you’d take a client for a ritzy business lunch or dinner. But you certainly wouldn’t get paint thrown on you if you showed up in a fur.

The restaurant’s owner, Sandy Lawrence, “wanted to do really creative cuisine that just happened to be vegetarian,” and hired Jeremy Fox and his wife, Deanie, both formerly of the world-class (nonveg) Los Gatos, California, restaurant Manresa, to be chef and and pastry chef, respectively. Jeremy Fox is not a vegetarian. Nor does he do yoga. In February, Ubuntu was lauded by New York Times food critic Frank Bruni as one of the 10 best new restaurants in the country alongside meat-centric places like New Orleans’s Cochon.

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The stealth vegetarian movement has even crept into the fast-food world. Restaurant chain Veggie Grill, out of Orange County, California, may give a little away with its name, but when you look at the menu, you see wings, Chinese chicken salad, and chipotle barbecue steak sandwiches listed. It’s only after staring very, very hard that you realize it’s not chicken, but “chillin’ chickin’,” a meat substitute. Likewise the steak. In fact, Veggie Grill is vegan.

“As soon as you tell people you’re vegetarian, or particularly vegan, you get a huge percentage of the population whose eyes glaze over and they think you’re nutty,” says cofounder Kevin Boylan. So Veggie Grill doesn’t. “This is normal food. Normal, delicious food. That’s all it is. No Birkenstocks. No crystals.”

The first of Veggie Grill’s soon-to-be-three locations was voted one of 2007’s best new restaurants by the Orange County Register in the general interest, not vegetarian, category. Boylan hopes to open up hundreds more around the country, and compares his business model to that of California Pizza Kitchen.

Courtesy of Veggie Grill Grillin’ Chickin’ sandwich at Veggie Grill

It will have some competition from Zen Burger, a spin-off of the New York vegetarian restaurant Zen Palate. With one outlet in Manhattan and another on the way in West Hollywood, Zen Burger serves fake-meat burgers, fries, and salads with what Director of Marketing Chad Carpenter sees as McDonald’s magic formula: low prices, fast service, and comfortable familiarity. On the back of its menu Zen Burger says it is “meat free” but avoids categorizing itself as vegetarian.

You Don’t Have to Join PETA

Zen Burger’s target audience is people who have “seen on Oprah” that they should be living healthier and eating healthier, says Carpenter, but who wouldn’t feel comfortable “walking into a vegetarian crusade.”

And that audience is on the rise. According to the Vegetarian Resource Group, which conducts a poll every three years, 2.3 percent of U.S. adults are vegetarians, double the number who were in 1994. But larger still is the number of nonvegetarians who sometimes swing that way. Packaged meatless food companies like Yves and Amy’s Kitchen report that the majority of their sales of veggie enchiladas and tofu dogs are to omnivores, who, as Yves brand manager Michael Goose puts it, “eat a steak once a month, but they know they shouldn’t, so they’ll mostly eat soy products and meat alternatives.”

In fact, vegetarian food, which may have seemed weird and scary to many meat-eaters just a few years ago, now seems positively warm and cuddly in the face of mad cow disease, tainted beef, and animal cloning. “With all the meat recalls, people are understandably mistrustful of what’s in their food, especially when they don’t know what’s in their food,” says Michelle Erbs, marketing manager for Amy’s Kitchen. That’s helpful to a company that lists organic vegetables as its main ingredients, “even though we don’t scream ‘vegetarian’ when you look at our box.”

But the new openness to vegetarian food is not only about health fears. Chez Panisse and the slow food movement helped make beets and peaches sexy, producing a class of diners who feel the way LA meat-eater Meaghan Rady does: “I love a nice vegetarian pizza with intriguing flavor combinations—fruit and a nice cheese perhaps.”

Stealth vegetarian restaurants are looking to seduce the fearful, the curious, the vegetable thrill-seekers. But ultimately, their objectives are benign.

“For me, it’s not really about the animal rights or being vegan specifically,” Pure Food and Wine’s Melngailis says. “It’s about steering people away from unnaturally processed, shitty food.”

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