I’m working on a round-up story of how notable local restaurants accommodate the needs of vegetarians. Which has prompted me to think of the needs of vegetarians.

A menu is a text, a way for us to interpret the vision and aesthetic of a chef/artist. We read through each dish, skimming the ones that don’t interest us—na, no sea scallops, not in the mood for veal—but some dishes capture our attention. We scrutinize the details, we imagine the sauce, the accompanying starch.

This should hold true for vegetarians, too. If a menu, in small italic print at the bottom, says merely, “We can accommodate special dietary needs,” the restaurant has punted. They have not imagined, executed, tweaked and menu-marketed a meat-free dish. They’re just making something up on the fly or, even worse, asking the vegetarian customer himself to come up with an idea.

It’s also not enough for a restaurant to say, “we can make any of the entrees vegetarian” by either substituting tofu or by merely deleting the protein. Then it’s not the dish the chef intended. With the protein deleted, there’s a gaping hole at the center of a dish, a hole that, texturally, tofu can’t always fill. Also, what does this mean for the price? Delete a $36 filet mignon and sub tofu—what’s the revised cost to the customer?

Another strategy restaurants sometimes adopt is to feed a vegetarian a variety of the side dishes from other entrees. So, a pile of “vegetable medley,” mashed potatoes, etc. Nutritionally, the lack of protein makes this approach inelegant.

Having just visited nine out of the ten restaurants I'm writing about, my conclusion is basically that every restaurant should offer at least one meat-free option that has had the same thought brought to bear on it as anything else on the menu.