Restaurant reviews by Justin Tanner, our retired food critic who thinks since these Bully XLs are being culled anyway we might as well make them fight each other
VEGANISM. The way I see it, you’re going some if you’re going a step more extreme than Hitler.
And what happens if we all stop eating chickens tomorrow? They’d be fucking everywhere. You’d be shooing them off your car before you could get in it, and there’d be flocks of them wandering the streets.
But I’ve had a text from an ex, in town and wants to meet up. At a vegan cafe. They’re like that, vegans. Never miss an opportunity to win converts, like born-again Christians and ski holiday enthusiasts.
She was always a bit hippy. Went to university, liked a spliff, read books, all the dangerous stuff. Still I won’t hold it against her if there’s a chance of some action. She never used to be averse to a length of meat, after all.
I stroll in there, having lied to the waiter that my shoes are pleather, and there she is not just older but having tubbed up. How’s that possible when all you eat is aubergines and fucking lentils?
The menu’s worse than I thought, though if you could eat sanctimony it’d be a feast in itself. No meat, no dairy, everything plant-based. Even the beers are ‘vegan’, as if you use cows to brew Banks’s mild.
She orders the five-bean chilli. I make a mental note to open the windows if she comes back to mine, because she’ll be farting like the breath of Beelzebub.
What will I eat? Cauliflower fritters sound disgusting. Plant-based burgers I won’t eat on general principle. Lentils were a joke in the 70s, let alone 50 years on.
My ex suggests the 3D-printed steak might be a gentle introduction to veganism. Apparently it looks just like a steak but it’s made of soy and beetroot and shit. I reply that this looks just like a restaurant but it’s apparently a meat forging mill.
But, open-minded as ever, I give it a try. And as bullshit passed off as meat goes, it’s not even close to the Greggs sausage rolls. Looks the part. Tastes alright. But why go to all that trouble when you could just slaughter a cow?
I nip off to the loo and the Pepperami I smuggled in down my trousers. It’s a bit sweaty but tastes like heaven, especially knowing I’ve got one over on the diet Nazis.
The so-called meal over, I suggest that, seeing as I’ve crossed the divide and come here, she owes me a visit to a steakhouse? She says ‘it doesn’t work like that’ and ‘this was probably a mistake’. You’re telling me, love.
Will I eat vegan again? Not knowingly. And believe me, with their fake food I’d know. I detour via the Chinese for a mixed meat chow mien special, then head home for some proper food and a hearty wank. Another day in paradise.
