Hello fellow voters; I hope you had a chance to vote early, absentee, or in person today. It will be a relief for the voter phone calls and ads to come to an end, won’t it? And I hope they clean up all the road signs too. I said I wasn’t going to vote for anyone who put up a sign but I had to take that back if I wanted to vote.
I read in the Post last week that a restaurant called Beefsteak (after the tomato variety) will open on the campus of George Washington University (22nd and I St) in January. The head chef, José Andrés, envisions a vegetable-focused dine-in and take-out restaurant where, “…If a customer wants more cauliflower, they will get it.” But meat? “It’s a side dish,” he says.[1]
“Vegetables are moving from the side of the plate to the center of the plate,” says Chef Richard Landau of the Philadelphia vegetable restaurant Vedge. Vedge, like many of the nation’s vegetable-focused restaurants, carefully sidesteps being called vegan or even vegetarian. “We shun the word ‘vegan’ because it comes with a lot of preconceived notions,” Landau says. I think that’s a good idea because, as the name Beefsteak implies, a vegetarian meal can be as filling and satisfying as a meat-intensive meal. Restaurants do not need to label themselves and invite people to stereotype them before eating and applying their own labels.
Vegetables are not, in my opinion, the new bacon, but there doesn’t need to be a comparison to threaten bacon-lovers. Vegetables can definitely take center stage on the plate, though.
[1] “Vegetables: Are they the new bacon? José Andrés and other chefs think so,” by Lavanya Ramanathan, The Washington Post, October 14, 2014
