Eating out as a vegetarian

[Lubo]

Hi all,

I was hoping to get people's opinions on eating out as a vegetarian. I have found it quite a hassle, as one has to read through long menus where most dishes are irrelevant because they don’t fit a vegetarian diet. I have thus decided to work on an app to change that, and I want to make sure it is useful to as many vegetarians as possible. Could you take 2 minutes and fill out the survey at Eating out as a vegetarian to tell me your opinion? My current thinking is to allow people to save their food preferences (e.g. for meat, poultry, fish, eggs, etc.), and then prefilter restaurant menus to show them only what is relevant to them. I just want to make sure this would be useful to people other than me.

Thank you very much for your feedback, I really appreciate it!

Lubo

 

[Danielle]

I usually go to vegan friendly restaurants so I enjoy looking at all the options. If they aren't specifically vegan friendly, I have trust issues

 

[Second Summer]

I think there are already some similar apps for this, in particular for vegans and vegetarians. (E.g. HappyCow.)

How do you plan to compete with the existing apps? What will you offer that they don't have? How will you build up a sufficiently large directory of restaurants?

 

[Amy SF]

One of the problems with filtering out what you're not likely to eat based on listings in a restaurant menu is that it doesn't leave any room for the possibility of having the chef make a special order, or asking the chef to leave something out of a dish or substitute something else. This is something I learned to do as a new vegetarian, because there are times when I don't have a choice of restaurants, such as going out to eat with my omni family. That's why, when I voted in the poll, I chose answer #2, because if I don't find something that's already vegetarian, I look at what they do have to see what can be modified. In a decent restaurant, a chef worth his or her salt (pun intended) will gladly make a special order or modify an existing dish.

 

[MikoDel]

Hi all,

I was hoping to get people's opinions on eating out as a vegetarian. I have found it quite a hassle, as one has to read through long menus where most dishes are irrelevant because they don’t fit a vegetarian diet.

take a gander @ my website, mikodel.wordpress.com, I have wonderful pictures of veggie food from local places here in suburban PA just north of Philly. I find almost all restaurants are happy to modify existing dishes to my specifications. I know what I like and I ask cheerfully.

Also don't forget SIDE dishes. I was at P.F. Chang's a few years back, I ended up getting three veggie sides, came to under $10, delicious and filling.

 

[Mikkel]

There are two things I dislike about Happy Cow.

1. Rating. They mean as long as the food is vegan, it can taste like puke and have staff from hell and you still can't rate them 1 star. The most excellent place with superb vegan food and most helpfull staff will never get 5 star if they have meat on menu. And would perhaps get less demand on vegan food.

2. No options to search after the most common allergies to find places with gluten free, nut free etc food.

If you ask people for hjelp, you often just get "look at HC" and you have still 50 restaurants to look through...

That is my two cents for a new app.

 

[silva]

take a gander @ my website, mikodel.wordpress.com, I have wonderful pictures of veggie food from local places here in suburban PA just north of Philly. I find almost all restaurants are happy to modify existing dishes to my specifications. I know what I like and I ask cheerfully.

Also don't forget SIDE dishes. I was at P.F. Chang's a few years back, I ended up getting three veggie sides, came to under $10, delicious and filling.

Tell me about Vedge

Are they banned