About

Vegetarian fine dining can be unusually hard to research. Most reviews, including the Michelin Guide, are focused on the “standard” menu offered by a restaurant, which, more often than not, is not vegetarian. While many restaurants offer to make their menu vegetarian on request, the results can vary: some put enormous thought and care into the vegetarian option, while others simply leave off the meat and serve what feels like a progression of side dishes.

On this site, I give my personal reviews of fine dining restaurants as a vegetarian. This includes both fully vegetarian restaurants, restaurants with dedicated vegetarian menus, and those “who-knows-what-we’ll-get” substitute menus. All reviews include course-by-course descriptions, which give a clear idea of what the vegetarian menu is like. I hope this serves as a useful resource to those, like myself, who like fine dining, but would rather skip the caviar and foie gras in favour of beautiful produce.

Rating System

The ratings given to each dish and the restaurant overall are for the food alone, not the service, ambiance, or value-for-money, though I occasionally comment on those aspects in the review text itself. While I make an effort to be objective to enable comparisons between different restaurants, these ratings are ultimately my non-professional opinion based on a single visit.

The rating system, like much of this site, is inspired by the excellent (German, and not at all vegetarian) blog Trois Etoiles. The meaning of the scores is described below. I also use additional indicators + or − after the number for dishes and restaurants that are slightly better or worse than the typical restaurant at this level.