I am omnivorous, but I have a sibling who is vegan. When we were both in the Bay Area, Golden Era ( https://www.goldeneravegan.com ) was a place that we found that... wasn't bad.
This was quite a while back but the first time we went in and looked at the menu the question of "is all of this vegan except for these two items with an asterisk?" (It was the 'classic' Chinese style menu with about 200 things on it with numbers to identify them).
I found the "drumsticks" and the pot stickers to be quite good. For an entree, I would have the Mongolian (now the 'Spicy Mongolian Delight') which was again quite good. The only problem with eating there is on the drive back home I'd have a hankering for some beef jerky.
We encountered that with a vegetarian restaurant in Mountain View (or was it Palo Alto? somewhere on El Camino Real) that had vegetarian food... but it was entirely boring without much flavor, texture, or... spirit. It was a bowl of bland vegetarian chili... with kale. No spices from onions, or garlic or anything really interesting. It was brown and green.
And so, that's what made Golden Era somehow different - it had flavor and did a lot of work with the sauces to make them interesting and desirable.
This is interesting. There's a few successful "vegetarian/vegan" places in my area, but they're all basically some variant of Chinese food and are from moderately to pretty good. There's also a few Indian places, but they don't really seem to register with the local vegetarian population as such, but at least can be quite good if you know where to look and have the usual amounts of flavor that Indian food tends to have.
However, there's a couple "Western" vegetarian/vegan joints in my immediate area that I've tried a couple of times. To be fair you get lots of food for the money, but both places produce a product that really is quite flavorless -- even with pretty different menus. Things like extra spicy vegan chili go down with the flavor profile of water, other dishes taste like salad baked in an oven, it's really dreadful shit. Yelp reviews for both places? 4+ stars. shrug
This was quite a while back but the first time we went in and looked at the menu the question of "is all of this vegan except for these two items with an asterisk?" (It was the 'classic' Chinese style menu with about 200 things on it with numbers to identify them).
I found the "drumsticks" and the pot stickers to be quite good. For an entree, I would have the Mongolian (now the 'Spicy Mongolian Delight') which was again quite good. The only problem with eating there is on the drive back home I'd have a hankering for some beef jerky.
The problem with many vegetarian meals is described in Vegetarian meals that aren't just brown gack - https://everything2.com/title/Vegetarian+meals+that+aren%252...
We encountered that with a vegetarian restaurant in Mountain View (or was it Palo Alto? somewhere on El Camino Real) that had vegetarian food... but it was entirely boring without much flavor, texture, or... spirit. It was a bowl of bland vegetarian chili... with kale. No spices from onions, or garlic or anything really interesting. It was brown and green.
And so, that's what made Golden Era somehow different - it had flavor and did a lot of work with the sauces to make them interesting and desirable.