THERE is possibly a does-your-dog-bite joke in here somewhere, I realise, as I ask the Chinese waiter, "is your ice cream vegan?"
“Yes, it is,” he says, smiling faintly.
He and I have chatted before during this meal and it’s fair to say he was sufficiently baffled back then by what I ordered, and perhaps also by my non-vegan silhouette, that he asked me outright if I was a vegan.
Not that you have to be a vegan to eat here. But it probably helps. Make that definitely helps.
“Do you have any ice cream that’s not vegan,”I ask anyway.
No, he replies, sending me spiralling into indecision about whether I can face a banana fritter with ice cream made from some deeply strange milk substitute.
I can, I realise, for what am I if not here to take a culinary bullet for you, dear readers?
And it turns out to be more of a pellet than a bullet, as the ice cream is cold, pretty taste-free and entirely inoffensive. Made from soya, I’m told. While the fritter itself is a full-fat blowback to the 1970s, soaking in a lake of sugary syrup. I eat it all.
It sends me on a nostalgia trip back to exciting family outings at the Chinese restaurant, when one of my sisters would always, always, spark a collective shudder by spurning such exotica as chicken sweetcorn soup, beef in black bean sauce, sweet and sour and insist instead on egg and chips.
How the rest of us groaned.
Ironically, all of those once-exciting and now plain-vanilla ordinary dishes are available today, right now, in the Lotus.
Except, of course, not a single one of them contains a drop of real meat, and most have no dairy either.
Instead they come with vegetarian beef, chicken, pork or mince. Whatever they are.
Saying that, I started with a very pleasant vegetable tempura; pumpkin and courgette in a crisp and dry, diaphanous batter.
Then spring rolls of the tiny variety followed with the occasional zing of a ginger hit lifting them from the completely ordinary.
As I am not vegan or vegetarian, though I probably would be if I lived in a different country, and can eat the real meat versions of most dishes at other Chinese restaurants, I scour the menu in search of something exotic for my main.
What are Chinese olives, I ask the waiter. Like European, he says, but bigger and better, making a shape the size of a boiled egg with his hand. I therefore order the Chinese olive fried rice only to discover when it arrives that it’s no more exotic than a bowl of rice, fried, seasoned in soy sauce with bits of sweetcorn, peas and diced vegetables, vaguely reminiscent of the stuff you see in those big mixed frozen veg bags in the supermarket.
If there are Chinese olives in here, and I’m sure there are, they too have been chopped and diced into invisibility.
Still, there’s something faintly surreal about sitting here listening to the same pling-plong Chinese music I remember from the 70s, with families filling long tables down there and everybody eating platefuls of meat-substitute traditional British Chinese restaurant food.
I’m thinking that not ordering that may have been a mistake as I look over at the next table and see a silver salver filled with what looks exactly like slices of beef silverside.
I have pumpkin in miso to contemplate. A gloopy dish with a strong salty flavour to the thick, beige sauce and not much at all to say about the big bland chunks of pumpkin.
Have I ordered wrongly?
Maybe, but I came in last week for lunch and had the Singapore-style mixed vegetable fried rice, which was pretty much the same as tonight’s olive one. With, say, the addition of curry powder.
The food here is not in any way offensive. It’s OK, but who is it for? Nostalgic vegans and vegetarians? Tentative converts to the meat-free world? I dunno.
Not me anyway.
Lotus Vegetarian Cuisine
69-71 Bridge Street, Glasgow (0141 429 0033)
Menu: A vegetarian, almost fully vegan, Chinese restaurant with 1970s dishes largely from the meat substitute end of the market. You will know if you like that sort of thing. 3/5
Atmosphere: Chinese ballads on the sound system. Relaxed old school setting with the music to match. 3/5
Service: Pleasant enough with a bit of old-fashioned bowing and a reasonable amount of smiling. 4/5
Price: Soups from £2.80, spring rolls £3.50, vegetarian tempura £5 and mains at under £9. What’s not to like? 5/5
Food: Excellent vegetable tempura, pleasant spring rolls, mains a bit more ordinary. Nothing to set the culinary world on fire but different and maybe worth a try. 6/10
Total: 21/30
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