Zen Garden

[cellio]

Dani and I went to Zen Garden, the new vegetarian restaurant in Squirrel Hill, after Shabbat tonight. I've been wanting to check it out for a few weeks now.

It was good if unconventional. Most of the items on the menu seemed to involve fake meat (I noticed chicken, beef, ham, duck, lamb, and shellfish variations). Most of the dishes were "oriental-oid", though there were other things too. I'm surprised that they didn't raid the Indian cusine for dishes, a lot of which are traditionally vegetarian and wouldn't have required modification.

We started with an assortment of dumplings. Dani then had the "zen salad", which was a nice mix of veggies and fruit (including fresh mango) with a tasty dressing. I got the "sizzling special" (I don't actually remmeber what the noun was, but it was "sizzling" something and under the "chef's specials"). This was an assortment of conventional stir-fry veggies with crispy wheat gluten in an orange-szechuan sauce. It was tasty but not as zingy as the little "hot food" icon next to the menu entry implied.

I have never before encountered wheat gluten as a thing unto itself, and I don't really know what it was that I ate. (I haven't checked Cookwise yet.) It had the consistency of fried tofu, sort of, and was pretty good (though I think that was aided substantially by the sauce, as is tofu). I know that wheat contains gluten by default and that there are recipes for gluten-free bread for those who can't tolerate it, but I guess I had mentally classified "gluten" into the "chemical" bucket, along with things like sodium and caffeine and vitamin D -- things you might add or subtract from food, but not food in its own right. You learn something new every day. :-)

Naturally, I haven't a clue how to explain this meal to my nutrition-tracking software. On the possibly-faulty theory that the wheat gluten is probably meant to be a protein source, I treated it as tofu. (I asked, and they do not have any sort of nutrition information that they can give to customers.)

Oh, and dessert. I had tofu cake. I am not making this up. It resembled cheesecake, and came topped with blueberries. It worked.

I would happily go back there again. There are a lot of things on the menu that sound intriguing.

I think they are technically vegetarian and not vegan, unless the cheesecake on the dessert menu was a fake. (I didn't ask.) I didn't notice obvious animal products in most of the items on the menu, though -- the cheesecake may have been the only indicator of non-vegan status.

Comments

[cellio]

Good point. I suppose given the context, the fake meat makes sense.

Thanks everyone for the "seitan" tip. I'd heard the word but didn't know what it was.

[goljerp]

I want to complain about all those Vegetarians who are preparing Satan in their restaurants. What's up with that?

(whisper whisper) What's Seitan? (whisper whisper)

Oh, never mind. :-)

[zare-k.livejournal.com]

Another thing that might be a factor (I'm making an educated guess here, no particular historical source to back this up... hey, another research project...): I think in Chinese Buddhist culture the decision to eat a vegetarian diet is approached in a different way than it is by many Westerners. It's often more an expression of religious intent/sentiment , where Westerners sometimes (often?) seem to make the choice based on a reaction to a specific aspect of how meat is processed/consumed. A book I have on women in the Qing dynasty era observes that many women in the upper-middle classes and above would, upon reaching 60yrs or so of age, choose to devote their time to religious study and become vegetarians as part of this. In that context, the desire to avoid any reminder of meat and its consumption isn't as applicable as for someone who gave up meat because of learning about slaughterhouse conditions-- sort of like someone keeping a halal diet might choose to eat turkey bacon, even though it's a simulation of something forbidden. Interestingly, the PETA diet recommendations for people considering vegetarianism are /very/ "fake-meat" centric, and most of their recipes didn't look as tasty as the Buddhist-style dishes.

Eh. Dunno if that made any sense (caffeine hasn't kicked in yet). I've had a good experience at all of the Buddhist vegetarian restaurants I've tried-- the quality of preparation is usually very good and I actually enjoy the wheat-gluten "meat" for what it is (nicely flavored, pleasingly chewy bits of veggies).