That Time I Finally Went to Vegan Treats (Mecca)

     Before spending a week in New Jersey, I asked my PPK friends where I would be able to eat. They came through with plenty of suggestions, as always, but the overriding theme seemed to be ‘Eat at Veggie Heaven above all else!’ Of course, they were right. Veggie Heaven, an Asian vegetarian restaurant in Denville, was all-around delicious, with superb sushi, decent dumplings, and wonderful faux meats used in fun ways. I set out to over-order, as is my wont, and everything was very good. 

     The next dish was actually a mistake, but a very delicious one. I ordered the Crispy Veggie Chicken Salad, but was brought the Crispy Chicken Wrap. It’s probably my bad, mumbling or something, but it was no big deal because look how pretty! With crispy soy chicken, avocado, spicy mayo, tomatoes, and mixed greens, the wrap was light and delicious, with the fresh veggies thankfully more prominent than the chicken. Also, spicy mayo makes everything delicious. (Except cake. That would be disgusting.)

     Since I have a love affair with appetizers (you can order so many!), I only got one entree, and I couldn’t even eat it! The Tom Yum Chicken arrived just so I could take a picture and then ask for it to be packed up. Too much food. Luckily, it provided me with two dinners. The flavor was great. I usually hate Americanized Chinese food entrees, with their sauce-logged components that all seem interchangeable. However, this sauce was not overpowering at all. It had touches of ginger and scallion complementing tons of basil leaves, spinach, and I think mustard greens, all mixed with crispy chicken strips that were perfection. Also, I love that the waitress asked if I wanted white or brown rice even before I could request brown rice. My kind of place! I enjoyed this dish and would recommend it, but I think next time I’d stick to appetizers. I just like being able to try smaller bits of lots of things. 

     Another standout was the Autumn Roll, a delicious, deep-fried mixture of veggie ham, jicama, and black mushrooms, all rolled in tofu skin and fried to crazy levels of friedness. So good! It was pretty heavy, and I usually don’t enjoy super-fried oily stuff, but this was really good, I admit. But I don’t think I could have eaten the entire dish myself, even if I hadn’t ordered other stuff, because it was so dense and filling. Even so, I’d probably get it again. Have you ever had deep-fried tofu skin? It’s like the coolest kind of wrapper ever! Look at that color! And it provides the perfect kind of bite and chewiness.  
    I was pretty impressed with Veggie Heaven and I definitely want to return next time I’m in the area. It’s like my version of Pan-Asian comfort food. There’s a lot of heavy, fried food, but it’s easily balanced by many light, fresh-tasting options. I didn’t get the chance to try their vegan desserts because I was counting on Silk almond milk soft-serve at the TCBY around the corner, but of course they didn’t have it. It sucks, because I really want to know if their Fried Tofu Ice Cream is vegan, and if so, what on earth it tastes like. Lesson learned: Always get dessert when you have the chance, and the worst that can happen is extra dessert! 

Veggie Heaven, Denville NJ

• Water speed: Amazing, upholding the Chinese restaurant stereotype
• Bathrooms: Nice single-serves off to the side
• Service: Decent, though I wish my many app plates came at a slower pace
• Food: Yummy!
• Bonus: Juices, vegan desserts, spicy mayo

    Every year for the past countable number of years (four?), the wonderful sushi restaurant Moshimo in Brighton has held a special all-vegan dinner event in which chefs from other restaurants present their spin on vegan sushi. It’s called the Great Moshimo Vegan Challenge. And boy, was this year a challenge or what. 
    It’s a contest, and the diners vote for the winner. Jojo at vegan.in.brighton invited me to join her this year, and considering how envious I have been in past years, I was all for it. Sadly, my suspicion that I bring bad luck around with me like a personal storm cloud was reinforced, because most of this stuff was hella gross.

    The restaurant itself has fantastic vegan food. It’s a regular mainstream sushi restaurant, but they have one of the most vegan-friendly menus I’ve ever seen in an omni place. Equally important, the management is very committed to providing sustainable sushi — short of eliminating fish altogether. (They did remove bluefin tuna from their menu early on though, so there’s that.) Hence their dedication to vegan sushi, the most sustainable kind, and this event for raising awareness and interest in this most excellent lifestyle.
     Everything I have eaten that was actually made by Moshimo chefs has been wonderful. It’s this whole letting-other-chefs-use-your-kitchen-and-feed-utter-nonsense-to-unsuspecting-patrons thing that gets tricky. At this event, eight chefs from different Brighton restaurants and catering companies came in and shared a vegan dish that incorporated the vegan sushi theme and their individual restaurant’s style. It’s a chance for great local chefs to be really creative and exciting and impressive. Usually, they are. This year, due to my storm cloud (but mostly due to lack of effort, taste buds, and common sense), the dishes ranged from boring to inedible to almost good, the worst kind. Well no, ‘inedible’ is I guess worse than food that with a little more effort could have been solid, but the latter makes me angrier. Let’s see what went down! 

      First, let’s look at all the wonderful food that Moshimo sent out between contest dishes to keep us happy. Seriously, these dishes were the best part of the night. Moshimo is a conveyor-belt-style sushi place, so it was really fun to pick the best looking plate coming down the belt. And it was really smart to keep diners happy and full with actually decent food. 

The sampler dish sent out first was heaven. Roasted squash, seaweed salad, and a warm crunchy dumplingy thing I want some of right now. All good. We also got loads of edamame, dumplings, and maki rolls coming down the conveyor belt during the night. Moshimo’s sushi is fantastic. It’s simple yet still interesting. 

      All right, fine. Let’s get to the contest. First up was a dish called Fancy Nancy, which we learned at the end (it’s anonymous because of the contest) was from the fancy upscale restaurant Terre a Terre. I have been dying to eat at this restaurant, but now? Now I’m iffy! See what one bad showing can do? You always have to be on your game, people! Fancy Nancy featured pickled lotus, kimchee, cilantro, lychee — all of this sounds great and very sushi-like, right — but then these great ingredients came on top of Mexican cheesy rice. Oh my god I am going to throw up again just thinking about how ridiculous this was. Cold, fresh, fruity ingredients over HOT SPICY VOMIT RICE??? What? It was like the rice that comes in a burrito, but two days later. And then with fruit on top of it. I DON’T KNOW. So gross. 

    Next up was Mochi Mochi (what a freaking creative name, people!) from the catering company Cashew. This was actually one of the three that I liked. However, it had nothing to do with sushi. They described it as mixed mushroom and edamame stuffed mochi, with ume, horseradish, pickle, cherry sauce, cucumber, and beetroot and carrot crisps. Okay, this was a potato croquette but made of rice. That’s it. A warm, comforting, mild croquette, without a sign of any ume or horseradish or anything aside from warm beigeness. But it was good! 

    Coming up next was the Sprouting Maki, from VBites, the winner every year apparently and the winner this year as well! Good job…putting faux teriyaki chicken on a ball of rice. That’s what this was. It was one piece of all-rice “maki” (that’s just a rice ball) with a dollop of vegan caviar (horseradishy tiny balls), and then one piece oh so small of maki with the chicken on top. And then there was a teeny tiny square of papaya, randomly. It won because that teriyaki chicken is amazing. They should have given everyone a bowl of the stuff over rice, but that would have been costly. Or at least the chicken should have been inside the maki to make it more interesting. Oh well. This was everyone’s favorite but I wanted it to be better! Don’t just drop the main/best part on top! And that one plain rice ball was like a boring plain slap in the face. I do want some of that chicken now, though. That Heather Mills knows her stuff. 

     Next was my favorite! I don’t mean favorite like this was delicious, or creative, or anything positive, but I mean it like holy crap, this was the funniest thing all evening. I mean what in the world. This Wasabi Canopy, I think it was called, was from Indian Summer, a catering company that didn’t even show up or send a chef, but just dropped off a tray of these and was like “Hey, other people who don’t work for us, put this shit on a plate and throw it in people’s faces.” It was a gram flour roll that was somehow like jelly. Gram flour, or chickpea flour, is one of my favorite food items ever. I use it all the time. Never in my experience have I discovered how to make it gelatinous and disgusting. I just…HOW??? How do you turn something as benign and wonderful as chickpea flour into a weird cold eggy roll? It felt like the devil’s work. 

   
    The dish from catering company 64 Degrees was at least properly named. It was called Gotcha, which is mean but it’s honest. And yeah, everything about this felt like trickery. It wasn’t bad at all, as a snack, but it was odd as a meal. Who thought of this? I wish I could have been in the room when the following conversation undoubtedly took place:

      “We should take those small square Japanese rice crackers that everyone knows well from bulk bins and are generically named “Asian Snack” and soak them in a sweet sauce until they get chewy. BUT NOT SOFT.”

                — “Um, Pete, that’s really weird. We’re trying to impress people with how good vegan sushi can be.”

      “F%*# vegans! All good sushi has fish in it. So let’s just take something that’s already vegan – rice cracker thingies, they don’t have a name – and serve it like it’s dinner.”

               — “But that will be really…weird. It might be a decent snack, but that’s not a good meal. We’re trying to win a contest here by presenting dinner food.”

      “If we win, then vegans win.”

               — “What?”

      “Do you want vegans to win?”

            –“I…what?”

      “Do you have a better idea?”

And that’s the story behind how we were served bowls of those crunchy rice crackery things soaked in a sweet miso glaze until they became unbelievably chewy and caramelized, and how we all lost teeth and gained future cavities. 

     The dish that came around next was probably the meanest food I’ve ever been served. It was a ‘Frida Kahlo’. I mean. wtf. That’s what the Mexican restaurant La Choza named this dish. It was a Freedom Rolls tortilla wrapped around habanero chiles, squash, adobo, and avocado wasabi sauce, cut into a maki-sized roll. So it was a little revolting burrito shaped like a piece of sushi. It was extremely hot because of the chiles, but with absolutely no other flavor besides hot public bathroom. Not only was it disgusting like bland vomit air, but it made me lose brain function for a minute and inexplicably I ATE TWO OF THEM. I was sick for weeks. Hell I’m sick now just thinking about it. Why would I waste room on two of these abominations? What on earth came over me? Did the first one not disgust me enough? Was a part of my stupid, stupid brain thinking, “Wait, was that thing I just ate disgusting, or am I making that up? Am I making that up? Did I forget so quickly what that tastes like? Here, let me try again.” NO! 

Luckily (or unluckily because I was almost too full from the two pieces of turd I had just eaten), the next dish was my favorite. It was a play on fish and chips and sushi at the same time, and it was definitely the most creative of the night, as if the chef had actually listened to the instructions. It was Unfish and Chips, from the catering company Egg & Spoon. The dish was a big fat piece of quinoa and pickled tofu stuffed maki with tempura tofu wrapped around the outside. A few spots of yuzu ketchup and wasabi mushy pea puree dotted the plate, along with a wakame rice chip. I wish I ate two of these instead. There was a lot of quinoa here, and it was a bit hard to eat, but so is all good sushi, or something like that. The taste was pretty much ‘tempura’, and it was delicious. However, one of the purees, I think the yuzu, tasted like hot empty trash sweat to me. Like a rotten piece of wood. Others thought it was fine, so maybe I had a bad batch or maybe I am allergic to dumb things like pureeing a yellow fruit and calling it ketchup. That was not delicious, but the main part of this dish was indeed, so it’s cool. They came in second place and rightly so. This was the kind of thing I was expecting every round to feature: something creative that actually tasted good. 

    Sadly, no one saved the best for last here. The last round was not even good. From caterer Sam’s, another terrible competitor who failed to send a chef in and just dropped off trays with no instructions and hardly even a how-do-you-do, came a kohlrabi and shiitake ‘salad’ with toasted sesame oil. I put salad in quotes because this looked more like soup given the amount of oil the kohlrabi was swimming in. So. freaking. wrong. I was so excited for some cool fresh veggies and I was given a full cup of sesame oil instead. The mushrooms were entirely too salty to enjoy, and the kohlrabi was freaking hard to eat with chopsticks because of how oily it was! So gross. 

    Luckily, the good people at Moshimo gave us their wonderful chocolate mousse for dessert. Can’t go wrong with simple chocolate mousse. 
    Man alive, can you believe this showing? Do I dare attend next year? It can only improve, right? Even though a lot of the dishes were gross, I’m really glad I went this year. I now know so many businesses to avoid! But seriously it was a lot of fun, and it’s always good to get Moshimo sushi! Even if I had to eat a lot of other crap as well.