by Than Saffel

Twenty - or even ten - years ago, many committed vegetarians felt relegated to the culinary back room of restaurant society. Mediocre health food restaurants and the rarity of interesting ingredients beyond tofu and miso, drove a heck of a lot of meat-free diners back into their homes clutching copies of Laurel's Kitchen and wondering if they would ever be able to ooh and aah over meals like their friends.

Sometime in the nineties, things began to get much, much better for folks who dreamed of an enlightened society where vegetarian fare was the norm. Thanks to creative chefs with strong feelings about health and sustainability, vegetarians can now walk into many restaurants and feel fêted rather than fettered by the options.

Making vegetarians rub their tummies in satisfaction without trying to cater to every esoteric ailment--and losing your toque in the process--comes down to absorbing four principles that every chef worth his mise en place already follows: preparedness, culinary curiosity, adaptability and staff education.

The first principle, preparedness, means having the wherewithal to substitute ingredients--or, better yet, build complex flavors from the ground up--so that veggie diners don't have to feel like they're being served food "without"--without meat, without sauce, and, too often, without flavor.

At Walt Disney World Resort's Animal Kingdom Lodge, Chef T.J. Sudiswa sees special diets as an opportunity to try new ingredients and fuse cuisines. Sudiswa presides over the kitchen at Boma, an African-themed restaurant that has quickly become known as Orlando's best vegan-friendly restaurant. "I always keep a pantry of favorite items--soy sauce, rice milk, coconut milk, bean curd skin, papadum--that can be prepared à la minute for our vegetarian guests. And fortunately, African cuisine, in general, is primarily grain and vegetable focused."  

Maybe so, but it's tough to imagine Boma's Deep Fried Tofu on Lemongrass Sticks with Funky 7-Veg Slaw rounding out a family get-together on the Kalahari. This is where principle number two, culinary curiosity, comes into play. Sudiswa and his team are constantly stretching the notion of what's appropriate to the menu, integrating African-American cuisines and dishes from his Indonesian upbringing into a highly eclectic--and financially very successful--menu. The result is a restaurant that offers an astounding number of vegan dishes while still delivering a sizable number of meat items to satisfy the supersized, middle-American culinary mentality.

Part of the restaurant's success as a haunt for both meat-eaters and herbivores is based on principle three, adaptability. At Boma, this means creating most dishes with a vegetarian base, using vegetarian stocks, sauces and flavorings wherever possible, then adding meat as a garnish.

Highly-regarded chef Nora Pouillion, owner of Restaurant Nora and Asia Nora in Washington, D.C., has been doing this for years. In addition to a menu that features mostly meat-based dishes, Pouillion offers a vegetarian chef's menu that changes every night as well as a soup and two appetizers, three salads and one full entrée. "The waiters," adds Pouillion, "are trained to advise customers that they can choose from the side orders of the protein dishes and put their own vegetarian menu together."

Pouillion is able to put together a custom meal without notice as well, as long as diners bring reasonable expectations to the table. "It seems to me that if you're a chef, you're in the hospitality business, and that means that you're here to please the customers," she says. "If someone comes into me with special needs, I can [create a dish] very easily, because I'm used to doing that on the spur of the moment. It's like exercise. I create a new menu every morning."

The key is to build adaptability into menus, teach kitchen staff how to think creatively and to communicate to vegetarian diners what you can do for them despite a limited menu.   And that hinges on principle four, staff education. It's important to let guests know that what may look like hostile territory actually holds more choices than they may be aware of.

Living in the miasma of lifestyles we now call "global culture," it is increasingly incumbent upon chefs to have some familiarity with every sort of cuisine, including vegetarianism. By approaching meatless cooking with a sense of fun and as an opportunity for growth, chefs can expand their businesses, their skills, and their culinary reputation.