...by which I mean being vegetarian and eating out. This was something I was really keen to try, and I am glad to say that I've had quite a range of experiences, both good and bad.
The first was in Weatherspoons in Carmarthen, interestingly with 2 vegetarian friends, on a Friday evening when we were all knackered and couldn't be bothered to cook. The intention was to just nip in for a quick bite before a DVD night. Unfortunately we chose to pop in on St David's Day, not a good choice in Wales! So it was incredibly busy and rowdy and service was understandably slow. The menu was disappointing in two respects - firstly for the very small number of vegetarian meals, and secondly for making them incredibly difficult to find! There was no dedicated vegetarian section of the menu, so I had to search each meal type, and within that the "V" for vegetarian was smaller than the rest of the type font and crammed in with nutritional info so they were really hard to spot. Eventually I chose a pasta dish which was....fine. Edible, nothiing wrong with it, but utterly unexciting. I had a similar experience on a work meal out with a drugs rep, at The Caraway - easier to identify the meals, but only maybe 5 in total on an A3 size menu. Nando's on a hen do (hen's in a chicken restaurant, classic!) was much the same - chose the spicier option simply to make it taste of something. The vegetarian breakfast at the hotel the next morning was very good, the only vegetarian item being a veggie sausage which was quite tasty.
A couple of weeks ago I went to the Veterinary Christian Fellowship Conference in Derbyshire. I've been going for years, all through being a student, and the food has always been really good (and highly plentiful!). Being a vegetarian was not such a great experience - fairly standard fayre of nut roasts and so forth, served significantly after everyone else on the table and already covered in sauce or gravy without being asked if I wanted it. I now its a conference and they have to stick to a budget, but I do think they could have done better.
Overall I am quite disappointed by my experiences. Most of the options seem to be pesto and/or butternut squash and/or sweet potato based with pasta. We seem to have moved on from the ubiquitous mushroom risotto, but it seems good quality tasty vegetarian meals are still beyond the average family restaurant chef. Maybe there just aren't enough vegetarians around to make it worth being more creative with vegetarian foods in restaurants? Or they just don't go out much for fear of not finding something worth eating! I have a week left to go, so if possible I'm going to try the vegetarian restaurant in town.
No comments:
Post a Comment