Restaurant Kitchens Got Very Good at Vegetables

Ten years ago, eating mostly plants in a restaurant meant one of roughly four dishes, and you learned to recognize them from the doorway. There was the risotto. There was the stuffed pepper. There was the vegetable lasagna, assembled that morning and now being reheated with visible reluctance. And there was the plate of sides, which is what you got when the kitchen had simply never thought about it: three small bowls arranged with enormous courtesy and no idea whatsoever. I ate a great many of those. I was polite about all of them.

Something changed, and it changed faster than I expected it to. On a good menu now the vegetable dish is often the one the kitchen is proudest of, and increasingly it is the one I would choose even if everything else on the page were open to me.

Technique migrated

The shift was not a moral one. Nobody in a professional kitchen woke up converted. What happened is that techniques developed for meat and fish got pointed at vegetables instead, and they turned out to work extraordinarily well.

Whole cabbages went into wood ovens and came out charred outside and steamed within. Celeriac got buried in a salt crust and treated like a roast. Cooks started brining, curing and drying vegetables, aging them the way they had previously aged things with bones in them. They found that a beet cooked for six hours is a completely different ingredient from a beet cooked for one. They built stocks and sauces out of roasted trimmings, mushrooms, seaweed and fermented odds and ends, and got real depth without a bone anywhere in the building. A lot of that depth is savory intensity, which turns out not to be the exclusive property of meat that most people assumed, and the hard browning that gives a seared steak its crust does much the same job on a thick slice of squash.

Cheap ingredients buy freedom

There is a practical reason as well, and cooks will tell you about it cheerfully if you ask. A head of cauliflower costs almost nothing. A cook can ruin three of them working out a dish and lose less than one wasted piece of fish. Low material cost means room to experiment, and it means the money a kitchen invests in the dish is nearly all labor, the hours and the technique and the seven-step preparation, which is exactly where a serious cook wants to be spending. The margin on a vegetable dish is also, quietly, very good indeed, and that has done more for the cause than any amount of persuasion ever managed.

Demand pushed from the other direction at the same time. Enough people started eating this way, a few of them all the time and a great many more of them two or three nights a week, that a table could no longer be treated as an edge case to be accommodated. A group of six with two plant eaters in it is not two awkward orders at the end of the pad. It is six covers a kitchen either keeps or loses, and that particular piece of arithmetic tends to get understood very quickly.

How to tell if a kitchen means it

Reading a menu, a few things give the game away.

• Where the vegetable dishes sit. Woven through the menu is a good sign. Boxed off at the bottom under their own heading is a warning.
• Whether the dish has a sauce built for it, or a sauce borrowed from three dishes along.
• Specific naming. A named variety, a named technique, a mention of how long something cooked for. Vagueness usually means a placeholder.
• Whether anything is described as an alternative or an option. Those two words mean the dish exists to prevent a complaint.

Ordering without being difficult

A short word on this, because I got it wrong for years by treating the person taking the order as an obstacle to be worked around. The single most useful sentence I have is some version of: I eat mostly vegetables, what does the kitchen enjoy cooking. Asked early, and without apology, it almost always produces something better than whatever I would have chosen, and occasionally something that is not written down at all. What does not work is negotiating a meat dish down into a vegetable one, component by component, while a queue of plates backs up behind you. Going at an off-peak hour helps enormously. So does ordering two starters and a side rather than hunting for a main, since the interesting vegetable cooking frequently hides in the first half of the menu anyway. A kitchen given a little notice will do remarkable things; a kitchen ambushed at half past eight on a Saturday will do its best, which is not the same thing.

What I take home from it

Almost none of this requires a professional kitchen. The wood oven is not available to me and never will be. But the underlying lesson travels: cook the vegetable hard, cook it long, and give it a sauce of its own. That is the entire gap between a side and a dish, and most of it is nerve rather than equipment. The other thing worth stealing is the discipline of using whatever is abundant, since every kitchen doing this well is also, necessarily, cooking with the calendar rather than against it.

I am aware that I sound like a convert, and I have spent enough time around food evangelism to be wary of my own tone; the longer version of that wariness is on the about page. But this is not a conversion. It is simply that the food got better. A charred pointed cabbage with brown butter and a fistful of herbs is not a compromise, or a substitution, or a kindness extended to the awkward guest at the end of the table. It is a very good thing to eat, and the fact that it happens to be a vegetable is the least interesting thing about it.