Chinese Veggie

There aren't way too many hard-and-fast principles in the food journalism biz, but i am fairly specific this can be one: whenever you discover that there is a Chinese vegetarian restaurant in Hayward called Veggie Lee — operate by a man whoever name, virtually, is Veggie Lee — you can get in an automobile and book it to Hayward the first chance you obtain. I must say I don't have option within the matter.

No body wants to read about a mediocre vegetarian restaurant, however, just because it does have a silly title and charming backstory. Thankfully, the food at Veggie Lee is great enough to get up on its merits.

It will probably come as not surprising that "Veggie" isn't chef-owner Che Heng Lee's provided name. Oahu is the English nickname he elected for himself when he swore down meat eight years back. Lee was indeed the professional cook at Daimo, a well-regarded Cantonese restaurant in Richmond, for around six years during the early Aughts. Later on, he was the chef and owner of Daimo's San Leandro branch.

At Daimo, Lee skilled in cooking fish. But difficulties with their body weight and cholesterol levels fundamentally caused him to look at a vegetarian food diet, that he credits with assisting him lose thirty weight. Even while, he had been nonetheless providing meat to their consumers, but he felt responsible. He had arrived at in conclusion which they, also, would-be healthiest should they ate just veggies.

Therefore, Lee marketed his San Leandro restaurant and, only a little over a year ago, exposed Veggie Lee, a vegetarian eatery based in a small, quiet shopping plaza in Hayward. The theory could be for Lee to make the skills he honed during those several years of preparing meat and seafood and apply all of them to vegetable cookery. In a nutshell, he didn't wish open up only any vegetarian restaurant: He wished to start a legitimately great Cantonese restaurant — the one that only happened to not offer any meat.

What you may think about Daimo (I've typically had great dishes at Richmond location), the cook's pedigree sets Veggie Lee aside from your run-of-the-mill Chinese vegetarian restaurant, whose proprietors may have acquired their particular cooking chops at a more common, Americanized Chinese restaurant, or who might come at vegetarian cooking from more of a spiritual (usually Buddhist) perspective than a culinary one.

The unmistakeable sign of this style of Chinese food is, naturally, its using "mock meat": wheat gluten (aka seitan) manipulated into as numerous forms and textural variants as you will find creatures that inhabit the land and ocean — roughly this indicates, anyhow. And even, dishes that prominently feature gluten-based choices to meat, pork, chicken, and various seafood take up the bulk of the selection. By and large, the wheat-gluten services and products on their own are not made in-house — Lee buys all of them from a Los Angeles-based business. And two omnivore cooks with greatly various degrees of competence might focus on similar slice of animal meat, fake-meat cookery, too, is all about what you do because of the item afterward — the method that you prepare it, period it, etc.

At Veggie Lee, you'll, for instance, order a rather enjoyable vegan General Tso's chicken. Theirs lacked the surface crunch that my really preferred versions of the variety of sauce-soaked wheat-gluten stir-fry boast, nevertheless spongy chewiness of the "chicken" and also the spicy-sweet temperature of the sauce had their attraction. (Some might scoff at such Americanized fare, but Lee noted that most likely 80 per cent of his customers are non-Chinese. There's some thing for everyone right here.)

On the other side end of this spectrum, I'd my first bowl of vegan shark's fin soup. The "fins" had been fashioned out-of konjac (a plant accustomed make a type of vegan gelatin) so that they resembled brief, thick vermicelli. The soup it self ended up being kind of dull, highlighting the texture of those fins rather than the flavor — which made the meal quite authentic to my experience of actual shark's fin soup.