I understand that y’all are a passionate crew, but please back off the personal insults.
Thanks,
twickster, Cafe Society moderator
I’m under the understanding that there are different schools of thought on vegetarianism, including whether vegetarians can eat eggs or cheese (or eggs AND cheese). I think Veganism is much stricter than a vegetarian who doesn’t eat ovo-lacto, but I dunno personally.
I have high hopes for a new BBQ place going in on the boulevard for just that reason. They are revamping an old Church’s building, and I got to talking with the new owner. He plans on selling tri-tip sandwiches, fries, and a few sides. That’s it. If his cooking matches his enthusiasm, I’m there for lunch every day.
A spin-off could be: the smaller the restaurant, the better your chances. The best taco place in town seats 6.
Just to be clear, I was joking about the fact the restaurant I linked to had a dinosaur motif rather than a pig motif.
I’ve eaten barbecue in the north and barbecue in the south. You get better barbecue in the south.
But New York makes better pizza.
Core Competency breaks down when the kitchen gets put on wheels. Korean tacos are proof Og loves us.
Where I live (Boston metro) restaurants definately pay attention if you tell them you have an allergy. Restaurants may find it a pain to cater to allergic patrons but they pretty much have to in order to stay in business around here.
…and the menu is painted on the wall.
Both of those points describe the best pizza place I found in years of living in Toronto. Family-run, seating maybe six or eight–or nine, if Mamma could be convinced to give up her chair behind the counter–and as per a point brought up earlier, there was often homework left open on the soft-drink chest (the few tables were for customers). And it was the best pizza in town.
Emory center for heart failure gave me one rule for restaurants:
Avoid restaurants.
Specifically, the issue with ‘normal’ cheese tends to be the use of rennet in the cheese making process. Rennet is most often taken from animal sources: the lining of the stomachs of calves. Vegetarian cheese will have been made using non-animal rennet.
Like most things with an individual’s dietary rules, it really depends on how strict you are with your own limitations.
As a Swede, I take affront at this. The Herring Ceveche Parmigiana is, on the other hand, awesome.
Would they?
How much of a level of care does a general multipurpose run of the mill restaurant owe to the patron to guarantee that ingredient X is not inside the food on pain of death?
I totally get it that the vegetarian restaurant using lard to fry food is going to have problems - that’s not I am talking, what we are talking here is the normal restaurant that doesn’t remove all of the cheese from a salad.
Is there such a thing as Mormon cuisine?
That’s not core competency, that’s someone else’s rule about combining ethnicities. And I agree, it’s not always a good rule. Banh Mi French/Vietnamese sub sandwiches are God’s disproof of the rule. Core competency means you don’t go to the Korean taco truck and order a hamburger.
I would imagine hot dish/casseroles are pretty prominent. Large families call for frugality.
To respond to posts earlier in the thread, my wife and I stayed on Moab, Utah years ago, and it was fine food wise. Beer and wine at the restaurants we went to, and decent food, including quite satisfactory BBQ at one place. I understand that Moab may not be representative, but there is good food to be had, it just may be sparse. There was also an espresso place that opened at 5:00am so we could get our coffe and drive out to arches prior to the sun rise.
Also, a friend of mine from Salt Lake City swears by The Red Iguana, a Mexican inspired restaurant in SLC. I don’t know how authentic it is, but the menu sure looks good. They even have Pibil on the menu.
In regard to fatal allergies, I think if I was running a restaurant and some patron told me that had fatal allergies to even small quantities of something I knew we used, I think I’d politlely decline to serve them anything wasn’t prepackaged, heated up in sealed package, and dumped on plate for serving.
Except in cases where certain fusions make perfect historical sense. Bahn Mi sandwiches, the fusion of French and Vietnamese is one such example. The long long French presence in Vietnam (and the entire region) makes French/Vietnamese fusion remarkably sensible. Cuban-Chinese is dying as a trend but another historically reasonable amalgamation.
There are times, however, when it makes perfect sense to go for the chain. We were staying outside of Beckley, West Virginia, a town of roughly 16,000. Anything that wasn’t a suspect looking hole in the wall (where the food was probably good but the atmosphere perhaps not so welcoming to outsiders, especially not black outsiders) was a chain – with the exception of the Chinese buffet, run by a Chinese family with homework on the back table and the most authentic and unusual Chinese dishes I’ve ever seen at a buffet in my life.
I never, ever ask “can it be made vegetarian?” because, thanks to utter fools who eat fish, or worse, chicken (or bacon) while claiming to be vegetarians, the word has lost any common cultural understanding. I say very specifically “I need this with no meat, poultry, bacon, or seafood of any kind, and no chicken broth, veal stock, any kind of meat broth or stock, can you do that?” Without specifics, you’ll get something you’re not bargaining for, especially in food with sauces. The hidden broth, man. Damn hidden broth.
It’s not that a cheese lasagna isn’t vegetarian per se, it’s that it’s not a vegetable lasagna, with actually vegetables in it, which is what a lot of people think of when they see “vegetarian” lasagna. Both a vegetable lasagna and a cheese lasagna are vegetarian, but only one has vegetables in it.
Fusion is not the same thing as multiple distinct cuisines under one roof.
For that matter, most distinct traditional cuisines themselves involve “fused” elements.
If you eat at a buffet, ONLY go during lunch or dinner hours when they are busy. There are few things worse than a buffet with the food sitting around because business is slow.
Mormon cuisine, from what I’ve gathered, has a large emphasis on using shelf-stable (canned, especially) foods, since part of the tradition is to have a very large pantry at your disposal. I think it might be several months worth of food at a time? And of course that has to be cycled through so as to not go bad.
There’s also a lot of Jello, and I’m told the frog eyes salad* is Mormon. You can debate whether fry sauce is Mormon or Utahan, but then, I’m neither, and I love good fry sauce.
*Neither a salad nor made of frog eyes, really. It’s sort of like ambrosia meets tapioca pudding by way of orzo.