City Speak: Jenny Berg

The veggie option needs more beef, writes Jenny Berg

I have long held the view that there are few places better than Brighton in which to be a vegetarian. What other cities this size can boast no less than two gourmet wholly vegetarian restaurants, offering those of us often deprived of choice the rare luxury to freely browse the selection of an entire menu, as opposed to agonizing over the choice between an uninspiring “vegetarian pasta” and a pitiful “mixed salad”?

The real veggie-friendly test, however, in my opinion, and which Brighton passes with flying grades, is to what extent vegetarians can walk out with a full tummy from a pub on a Sunday afternoon. All those yummy vegetarian Sunday roasts – the most traditional of meaty meals – certainly get many Brighton pubs a gold star in my book.

That’s why it still surprises me to see, which I did on Friday night, a menu of a moderately up-market restaurant and bar in the centre of Brighton, listing a wide range of meat and fish dishes, with requisite specification as to what precise animal and what exact part of their body, and with what sauce and seasoning, was being served up, and then, next to that: “vegetarian specialty”.

Let me ask you, meat eaters and creators of restaurant menus, on a scale from one to ten, just how excited would you be about ordering a dish called “meat special of the day”? Or how about “pasta with mixed meats”? You’d want to know a bit more, wouldn’t you? What is it that makes chefs and restaurant owners think that vegetarians are happy to eat – and pay for – anything as long as it is labeled “vegetarian”? Have we, by choosing not to eat meat, ostracized ourselves from the community of restaurant diners and forfeited our rights to not only being presented with a selection of dishes, but also to ordering a meal with at the very least a vague idea of what’s likely to be served up?

It’s time the managers of mainstream eateries around town wake up to the fact that the not dismissible proportion of Brighton’s population who don’t eat meat often go out with people who do, and start cooking for them too. It’s really not that hard to create a decent meat-free meal from whatever ingredients are already available in a normal restaurant kitchen, and it shouldn’t be that hard to describe that meal in enough detail to make someone actually want to order it.