- Today there are a large number of plant-based eating options in London, including many based on Chinese food
- Dan dan noodles, bang bang chicken, dumpling, barbecue pork buns, baos – vegans and meat eaters alike enjoy the wide range of meat-free options
The word "vegan" will turn 75 years old next month, coinciding with the anniversary of the foundation of Britain's Vegan Society.
Established by Donald Watson of Leicester in 1944, this society was set up for vegetarians who wanted to avoid all animal products in their diets. Watson felt that this subset of vegetarianism deserved its own name, so asked members for ideas. Among the suggestions were dairyban, vitan, benevore, sanivore and beaumangeur. Eventually Watson settled for vegan " a term he and his wife had invented using the first three and last two letters of the word "vegetarian".
Britain launched more vegan products than anywhere else in the world last year, according to the Vegan Society. It also claims that between 2014 and 2018, the vegan population in the country quadrupled, and London restaurants are responding to this demand.
Fish and chip chain Sutton & Sons opened an entirely vegan chip shop a year ago and has created a "fish" made from banana blossom. It is marinated in seaweed and samphire to give salinity and ocean flavour, then battered and deep fried, and served with chunky chips.
Fast food fans can sample burgers that bleed beetroot blood at Halo Burger in Brixton, South London, Britain's first 100 per cent plant-based burger joint. Even the Michelin-starred restaurant at legendary London hotel The Ritz now offers a vegan tasting menu.
Plant-based eating has a longer history among many of the ethnic minority communities in London. There are large numbers of vegetarian Indian restaurants with dairy- and egg-free options on the menu, and Caribbean restaurants that offer Ital dishes (avoiding meat, dairy and sometimes salt) across the capital. Most Chinese restaurants in London offer vegan dishes and there are a handful of chefs who specialise in vegan Chinese cuisine.
The great thing about vegan food is that it is inclusive. I can't tell you how many different nationalities we have coming hereZhong Chen, owner of Zen Buddha restaurant in London
Zhong Chen claims his restaurant, Zen Buddha, in Edgware, North London, is the longest-running vegan Chinese restaurant in the city.
"My mother-in-law opened this restaurant in 1996," he says. "It was vegetarian originally, then in 2005 we turned it into a Loving Hut (an international vegan restaurant chain) franchise. I took over from my mother-in-law when she retired, and two years ago I decided to try my own thing."
At a midweek lunchtime, Zhong's restaurant is packed with customers of varying ages and ethnicities. He offers an all-you-can-eat buffet, where customers fill their plates with acid yellow Singapore noodles, dayglo orange sweet and sour gluten, and piles of fried rice and fresh vegetables. He has an A la carte menu available too, featuring a range of vegan dim sum. One of his most popular menu items is an interesting "bang bang chicken" cold dish, made from strips of firm tofu in a salty and spicy peanut sauce, with shredded cucumber for freshness.
"The great thing about vegan food is that it is inclusive," says Zhong. "I can't tell you how many different nationalities we have coming here. There is a large Jewish community in this area and I get many takeaway orders from them, as they don't have to worry about meat on my menu."
Zhong has noted a change in his customers over the last decade. "In recent years, more young people are coming in," he says. "So I need to adapt to appeal to the younger people. I am thinking about installing a vegan ice cream counter."
Over in East London, 29-year-old Californian Julian Denis is chef-owner of Mao Chow, an "inauthentic Chinese vegan restaurant". He uses carefully chosen language to avoid accusations of cultural appropriation (Denis is not Chinese), but his northern-Chinese-inspired dishes effectively convey the complex, layered flavours of the region.
Denis trained at the famous, now-defunct, Chinese restaurant Fung Tu in New York under chef Jonathan Wu.
"Jonathan showed me how regional and seasonal the cuisine is, something I had not understood before," he says. "I worked with him for two years and although I was vegan " but I prefer to avoid the label " I did cook meat while working with him."
Denis has been living a plant-based lifestyle for some years, having got into it through the punk rock scene in California.
"It's not so much from a love for animals, but because our planet is crying," he says.
After he moved to London, he continued to cook Chinese food in his spare time. "I started a pop-up around two years ago," he says.
Then, in May this year, he moved into a 12-seat space in Mare Street, Hackney, in London, where he has been serving vegans, hipsters, veg-curious and Chinese food fans dinner from Tuesdays to Saturdays.
Customers wait patiently for a seat to try his much-Instagrammed food. His dan dan noodle dish, which substitutes a satisfying mix of "meaty veg" (a combination of beetroot, mushroom and potato) for ground pork, has astonished both vegans and meat-eaters, who marvel at its rich, earthy and delicious flavour.
"I get a lot of Chinese customers," says Denis. "I think most come in wanting not to like it. They don't rave about it but they definitely aren't hating it."
Business partners Jade Rathore and Angela Li have created an award-winning vegan-Chinese supper club and pop-up restaurant called Phung Kay Vegan. The business won the Best Vegetarian Dish category at this year's Golden Chopsticks Awards, which celebrate Oriental cuisines in Britain. The Phung Kay team were also featured in a short docu-film that was recently broadcast on Chinese web platform Baidu.
Both women have full-time jobs and concentrate on Phung Kay at the weekends. They also sell a range of home-made vegan sauces, including an extraordinary XO sauce that is layered, fragrant and umami-rich.
Li was born in Britain but moved to Hong Kong to live with her grandparents until she was seven, when she returned to Bedford. Her grandfather and father were both chefs. She is a recent convert to veganism, having taken part in the annual Veganuary campaign, where participants adhere to a vegan diet for the first month of the year.
"I was becoming more aware of animal agriculture and the environment," Li says. "I am an animal-lover and it just made sense (to become vegan)."
Rathore's family had a tofu factory. The friends shared a house and regularly found themselves cooking together.
They design imaginative menus inspired by Cantonese flavours. At a dim sum event that featured a range of their enticing and well-made items, a siu mai (pork and seafood dumpling) made from modern meat substitute Omnipork was so realistically meaty that the eyes of a committed vegan at the table widened with fright when he tasted the filling. Meanwhile, a carnivore ate a char siu bao (steamed pork bun) filled with sweet and savoury gluten instead of pork and could barely believe it was vegan.
"There is a lot of flavour in Chinese cooking, therefore more often than not, even after removing the meat from the dish, it still tastes amazing," Li explains.
Meanwhile, business partners Frank Yeung and Nick Birkett run a group of restaurants inspired by the Taiwanese street snack gua bao and they are also experimenting with vegan food. They have two restaurants in South London: Daddy Bao in Tooting and Mr Bao in Peckham, as well as the recently opened Master Bao in Westfield, West London.
Birkett is excited by the challenge of creating vegan Chinese snacks. "We've developed one of the country's first vegan bao, stripping out the milk that's usually seen in the buns and tweaking the recipe," he says. "We will be filling those with all sorts of ingredients like ginger braised tofu, and shiitake mushrooms."
Birkett adds that what the pair are aiming to do with their vegan options is to give customers the same rich tastes that ingredients such as pork and chicken bring, but doing it with plants only.
"It's actually very good for us from a commercial perspective because it's hard for customers to make these vegan options at home so they need to go out to restaurants like ours to get them."
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