I’m a city dwelling (LA to San Francisco to New York back to LA and now San Diego), grilled vegetable/veggie burger/mushroom hating, dining out loving, minimal salad eating vegetarian vegan. I’m here to offer a critical perspective from “the other side” of eating.

As Mr. Platt stated on the “unfortunate habits” of food critics: “One is to regale their helplessly trapped, mutely attentive guests with endless gasbag tales about how they’ve seen and devoured everything under the culinary sun.” Well, I strive for the opposite! My culinary expertise it refined and focused on a single area of the menu, the often overlooked lowly vegetarian vegan option. I (sort of) explain it in my first post

I’ve always been enthralled by food, and even though I grew up as the only vegetarian in my house, I never ever felt I was eating anything different then the rest of my family. We all loved my dad’s fried brown rice balls with sweet shoyu or my mom’s homemade cheese enchiladas, never thinking theses were meatless… and so what if I ate extra servings of mashed potatoes and asparagus with lemon sauce at Thanksgiving, these dishes are masterpieces. Back in high school, my friend and I would write reviews as fictitious restaurant critics… but I soon realized that people marginalized my experiences just because I don’t eat meat; so I stopped. In January 2009 I casually began writing reviews on Yelp and the years of pent-up food enthusiasm came flooding out in written form, and to my surprise the reviews were well received by that snarky bacon loving community and my steak and potato friends.

I still have a lot of content at Yelp: vegetarianfoodie.yelp.com

I’m doing this because I think it in unfortunate that omnivores frequently dismiss vegetarian vegan dishes because of the stereotypical classification that it is “lacking” “healthy” “boring” or whatever. Vegetarian vegan food is something (almost) everyone can enjoy and it is so disheartening when people miss out on the palatable high of Aquavit’s Zucchini Ravioli or Shake Shack’s ‘Shroom Burger just because of these crazy preconceived notions. There is a reason heavy hitters like Daniel and Per Se offer vegetarian tasting menus – vegetarian vegan dishes can be a consumable virtuoso, and I’m here to prove it.

TheVegFoodie@gmail.com