Even the city’s best restaurants deal with meat-averse customers in a variety of ways, from discouraging them to welcoming them.
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Priya Krishna is a Food reporter and an interim restaurant critic.
More times than I can count, I’ve heard the same refrain from my vegetarian relatives visiting New York: This is not a friendly city for the meat-averse. Restaurants don’t offer enough meatless options, they say, especially dishes that are as filling and interesting as the nonvegetarian ones.
How could that be? We live in an era when “plant-based” and “vegetable forward” are cultural buzzwords, and New York has one of the most diverse and robust restaurant scenes in America.
Yet when I asked readers to share their experiences of dining while vegetarian, I heard from scores of New Yorkers who agree with my relatives.
Several told me that because many restaurants shrank their menus to cut costs during the pandemic, it’s harder than ever to go meatless. “We used to have two options” on any given menu, said Charlotte Brooks, a Baruch College professor who lives in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn. “You may now not have one.”
Tracie Lyons, a lawyer who lives on the Upper West Side, said that since she became a vegetarian in 2020, “dining out has ceased to be a joy and is now more of a chore.” She has to research each restaurant beforehand to make sure there will be options for her.
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