The restaurant is called 'Greenland'. Everything about this place was screaming 'healthy food' or even 'vegetarian' to me, but I wanted to take a look at the menu before we decided this was a place for the nature-minded-healthy-food-eating-vegetarian-types (like myself).
Oh, what is this? The picture below proves my suspicion! The sign out front of the restaurant proudly announces it's a vegetarian restaurant. Sure there's some confusing Chinese characters under the English but that one English word 'vegetarian' is all I needed. I was hooked so we went in.
On the way in we noticed it was a 'Taiwanese Vegetarian' restaurant. Even better! My experience with Taiwanese Vegetarian food is they're masterful at producing convincing fake meat dishes. The taste, look, and texture all points you to believe it's real meat when it's actually just tofu and other ingredients.We go in, sit down, and look at the menu. The menu sitting on the table is all in Chinese. Lots of words I don't understand and colourful pictures. A waitress hands me an English menu but the English one oddly isn't the same size as the Chinese one. It's missing complete sections and has less pictures. The descriptions for the food is lacking in the English one as well so Aimee and I just decide to order off the Chinese one by pointing at the pictures. We order fake grilled BBQ beef on a stick, fake soy chicken, and fake ginger beef. The first dish, the grilled BBQ beef on a stick arrives and we dig in. Wow, what flavour. I haven't eaten beef for years but what I can remember, the taste, texture and look is almost exactly like the real thing. The next dish arrives: soy chicken. On inspecting the fake chicken I notice it has bones in it. Okay, a little odd but I've heard of Taiwanese Vegetarian places that actually go through the effort of adding fake chicken bones to the dish to give it that extra presentation. I bite into the 'chicken'. Hmmm, now I'm getting a little confused. Do fake chicken bones have bone marrow inside? We decide, okay, this is silly, let's ask to be certain this is fake meat. We call the waitress over and say, "is this real meat or fake meat?". The waitress doesn't understand the question and calls someone over who understand English better. So we ask waitress #2. She doesn't understand and calls over a waiter. We ask the waiter. He doesn't understand the question so Aimee decides to ask them in Mandarin (since her Cantonese skills are limited). In Mandarin she asks, "is this meat or vegetable?". They look at us perplexed, then stare at us like we're morons and say, "meat of course!" (I guess it was a silly way to phrase the question considering meat looks a lot different than say, a carrot). Finally it sinks in and I realize I've been chowing down on meat. The third dish arrives, the ginger beef. Once again, it's real meat. What kind of vegetarian restaurant is this? On closer inspection of the menu we discover there is one page dedicated to vegetarian food. A page that was missing from the menus we were given. A page of food that accounts for only 5% of the total food options in the restaurant. What the...? Why in the world would anyone call a restaurant 'Greenland', decorate the place with happy green forest loving pixies and scenes from nature and slap a sign out front that reads 'Vegetarian' when you really don't serve enough vegetarian dishes to claim to be vegetarian?
For revenge I want to open a restaurant next door called 'CarnivoreLand', decorate it with pictures of happy dancing beef eating cowboys, place a sign out front that reads, "Meat", but only serve vegetarian items inside.
You lied to me happy dancing green pixie. I'll never trust you again!
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