Viva Vegetarian!

A Guide to Delicious Hudson Valley Dining

by Karin Ursula Edmondson and photographs by Jennifer May, February 25, 2011

A vegetarian in her purest form is a person who does not eat meat, fish, or fowl. More rigorously, a vegan does not ingest any food derived from animals, fish, fowl, or insect, including dairy, eggs, and honey. Both vegetarians and vegans receive their sustenance from plants—vegetables, fruits, herbs, nuts, and grains. For several decades, a vegetarian diet was viewed as “Spartan, a rebuke and brimming with self-righteousness,” says Jay Blotcher, who works in the media relations department at the Culinary Institute of America. Blotcher has been a vegetarian for 32 years, vegan for the last 10 months.

Modern vegetarian cuisine is anything but Spartan—inventive, creative and full of flavor, a sort of introductory primer on global food traditions that employ vegetables and other plant offerings as their nutritional mainstay. Globalization has familiarized products in most American supermarkets that 30 years ago were nearly impossible to locate: coconut milk, fresh lemongrass, shitake mushrooms, poblano peppers, ginger root, rice vinegar, and sesame oil. The CIA now introduces students to vegetarian and vegan culinary principles as part of its degree programs. In May 2012 the CIA will publish Chef Instructor Katherine Polenz’s Vegetarian Cooking at Home, a multicultural collection of savory vegetarian recipes.

Some of the best purely vegetarian/vegan restaurants in the Hudson Valley apply multicultural food traditions; dining at one of these eateries often feels nuanced and sophisticated. Peter Maisel, chef/owner with his wife, Debra, of Tivoli’s Luna 61, interned (surmounting language barriers) at the legendary macrobiotic restaurant Souen in Manhattan. This is evidenced in the profusion of Asian-inspired embellishments Luna 61 offers—ginger scallion sauce, ume plum paste, sweet chili sauce, soy chili sauce, Thai barbecue sauce, Szechuan sesame peanut sauce, sesame balsamic dressing, spicy coconut broth.

Food inspirations might be exotic, but food philosophies at most vegetarian places are predominantly local and organic. In the summer season, vegetables, fruits, and herbs are sourced directly from local Hudson Valley farms or farm markets. “Local is better,” says Debra Maisel. Local produce has the bonus of incomparable flavor, just-picked ripeness, and a taste of terroir. In the winter, Pam Brown at the Garden Café on the Green in Woodstock sources local polenta, whole wheat bread flour, maple syrup, cashew ice cream, potatoes, and apples for her winter menu, so that the dining experience is still redolent with local flavors. The myriad reasons people opt for a plant-based lifestyle: health, ecology, animal rights, nonviolence, religious beliefs, or any combination of these reasons might have formerly smacked of the sanctimonious, but in light of today’s global health and environmental crises, a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle might just be a flavorful, curative option available to everyone.