My first vegan dinner party was challenging, but not a disaster

Several months ago I posted a review of two vegan restaurants in London. While I enjoyed both places, I pointed out that vegan options seem to be most in tune with Asian and Oriental cuisines that are already heavy on vegetables and default to lavish spicing for depth of flavour. People with more traditional palates who are fans of subtlety, richness, and creamy finishes would find things more difficult.

That’s precisely the challenge I decided to accept when I hosted my first vegan dinner party. I could have gone down the spicy Asian route, and that’s where most cookbooks wanted to take me. But my husband would be at the table along with our vegan friends, and I wanted him to have some chance of enjoyment. So we’d be tomato free, because of his allergy, and I’d get as close to traditional European as I could.  

My menu was more of a hotch-potch than my usual carefully themed dinner party, with flavours and influences coming from all over the place … but I was basically happy with the results. My guests said they were delighted. They’re too polite to have said anything else, but clean plates and the amount they packed away suggested authenticity. Even the husband was satisfied.

So, the menu went like this…

I laid out three amuse bouche for people to nibble on while I was cooking. First, a jar of home-pickled okra. This was one of the great revelations of my short stint in Texas, and if you’ve never had this vegetable pickled you’re missing a treat. While mine have never quite matched the glory of the Talk of Texas brand (naturally unavailable in the UK), it’s fairly easy to get good results by jamming a bunch of clean, fresh okra in a big Kilner jar with some garlic and some spicy peppers, topping up with hot pickling liquid and letting them sit for a week. Next, I put my set of restaurant-style tasting spoons to use and piled a little dollop of barley, roasted squash and roasted red onion salad on each. These were both already prepped in the fridge, so low effort. 

My third snack required a little more, but was essentially a bit of refrigerator clean-out. The last of the Christmas Brussels sprouts, quartered, stir-fried, served on top of a bit of vegan soured cream (it’s not bad), on top of a fried disk of potato with grated chestnut to finish it all off. I missed the lardons that usually spike our Brussels. The pork gives them far more depth of flavour and balances their bitterness, but this wasn’t bad.

Embracing the spirit of dry January, I paired all of this with a mocktail made up of Tanqueray Flor de Sevilla 0%, Martini and Rossi alcohol-free Vibrante, a bit of orange juice, a trace of pomegranate syrup and a good whack of lime juice, topped up with diet tonic water. I’m still playing with proportions … my first round was a bit sweet and the orange juice may not be needed at all … but this is an option I’ll happily drink even in less austere months.

My starter was the best dish of the meal, IMHO. There are a great many recipes for roast celeriac with a white bean purée … a particularly good dish for Weight Watchers as the only thing “pointed” is olive oil and some tahini. In my version, I started with a whole, raw celeriac cleaned and then slathered with plenty of olive oil liberally mixed with herbs de Provence, salt and pepper. Lots of recipes go down spicier, more Asian routes but that was off brief. The celeriac goes into a Dutch oven with its lid on and then sits at low heat (about 150C) for at least three hours. I popped the lid off every 40 minutes or so to roll the root around in the oil and herbs and turn it. At the end, you should have something that’s brown, sticky and caramelised on the outside and soft to a knife thrust inside. The purée is simply a tin of butter beans (any white bean will do; the flavours vary slightly with your choice), a heaping tablespoon of tahini, olive oil and some of the water from the bean can. All mixed until you get it to the taste and consistency you prefer. Then it was as simple as a schmear of purée on each plate, topped by a quarter of the celeriac and some finely chopped flat leaved parsley.

Given the newness of everything I was trying, I went for a personal safe space of home made pasta for the main. I stuffed my agnolotti with a mix of mushrooms, including re-hydrated morels and black trumpets. I wouldn’t be mixing in the usual ricotta, so I thought I’d better up the stakes on the fungi flavour. That worked. Normally, I’d do the pasta with a simple brown butter and sage sauce, spiking it with some hazelnuts before scattering Parmesan across the top. With butter and cheese off my options list, I defaulted to another safe space and did a simple fresh tomato sauce. 

I topped things with more of that vegan soured cream instead of Parmesan. While my guests proclaimed their delight, I wasn’t happy. The sweetness and acidity of the tomato overwhelmed the forest floor flavours the dish should have had. I was looking with envy at my husband’s substitute cheese sauce. I should have been brave and tried vegan butter with my usual recipe. 

Rationalising that alcohol if burned off didn’t break dry January rules, dessert was grilled pineapple in a flambéed rum sauce with coconut granita. OK, not quite flambéed. I didn’t move fast enough and there wasn’t enough alcohol left to ignite by the time I got the lighter out. But it was tasty. And would have been even better had I remembered to crush and toast the macadamia nut topping before serving. 

The granita is wonderfully simple. Tinned coconut milk mixed with a bit of sugar syrup, poured into a freezer container, kept soft by a fork running through it every half hour. Two warnings here: do NOT miss any of those forkings or you’ll get the texture all wrong, and plan for at least four hours in the freezer. (The rapidly-melting scoops in the photo only had three.) It’s also best to only make what you’re going to eat, because once you stop that bi-hourly agitation you end up with a big coconut ice cube.

The finisher was, admittedly, more Caribbean than European, but I’m satisfied I ended up with a menu that stayed safely on our more familiar side of the planet.

Vegan is never going to be my go-to option for entertaining. But in a world where more people are embracing the option, I don’t want to have to exclude friends just because they can’t eat what I’m cooking. And culinary experimentation is always a good thing. That celeriac starter is good enough to go into the Bencard dinner party rotation. It will be even better when followed by a succulent bit of pork belly.

These two London spots will please vegan and omnivore alike; as long as they don’t mind spice

I hate people who politicise food. Vegan twenty-somethings who climb onto their soapboxes to tell me what not to eat are often urbanites who display a shocking ignorance of seasonality and the realities of food production. The hypocrisy of one such, haranguing me on the evils of “stealing” honey from bees while entirely ignoring the crisis of falling pollinator populations and the fact that honey production helps redress the balance, provoked rage. Yet I’m equally angry at those who, decrying all “woke” causes, will order an enormous sirloin just to “really irritate the damned vegans.” Or load up on cheap meat at a discount store without thinking about its production.

Food deserves respect. Whether you are a carnivore, a vegan, or somewhere in between. That slice of bacon on your plate took the same levels of care and attention as the tomato, and the manner and location of its production can make a vast difference to its environmental impact. I honour anyone who does the hard graft to feed me. If anything, I am slightly in awe of vegan cooks, who … in my culinary frame of reference … have to cook with one hand metaphorically tied behind their back. 

It’s from that perspective that I can recommend both Mildred’s and Vantra in London’s West End. Both are strictly vegan, but the flavours coming out of the kitchen keep you focused on the joys on your plate rather than a contemplation of what’s missing. There is no sense of sacrifice or abstinence, and no need to hit Burger King on the way home to fill a stomach left empty by salad. Which is, I sheepishly admit, what I was expecting as I braced myself for my first vegan encounter.

This introduction was at Mildred’s, an excellent gateway experience to vegan dining. It’s a bright, buzzy, modern cafe on St. Martin’s Lane, full of people of all ages indistinguishable from any other set of restaurant patrons in Covent Garden. Another foolish pre-conception crushed. There were no heavily tattooed, uncomfortably pierced, Birkenstock-wearing anarchists in sight. There was a lot of moreish food hitting tables.

Tempting starters include a wild mushroom tortelloni, not far off of what I’d make at home, where I’d always default to a cream or a brown butter and sage sauce it’s done here with a “caramelised leek cream” that, by some kitchen wizardry I can’t comprehend tasted as good as anything to come out of a cow. On future visits I’m curious to try their takes on whipped feta and loaded nachos. My one experimental purchase of vegan cheese was frightening, but the dairy alternatives here were delicious.

My main was called “bokkeumpab”, a twist on the Korean fried rice classic but with spicy tofu. Exquisite. Though that still didn’t keep me from envying my friend’s fried “chick’n” burger, another foray into spice and tofu that delivered all the comfort and sloppy, multi-layered joy you want from a burger. If you think about it, chicken and tofu are both relatively tasteless proteins that come into their own when a chef pairs them with something that gives them flavour. It’s actually no wonder they’re interchangeable. Maybe someday we’ll say “it tastes like tofu” instead of “it tastes like chicken” as the ubiquitous descriptor.

Mildred’s desserts astonished me most. As an accomplished cook in the Sicilian tradition I’m no stranger to oil instead of butter and vegetables as stars. But to create a proper desert without egg or dairy products seemed impossible. I was wrong.

Mildred’s carrot cake could compete with any “normal” version, and some might even find the lighter, fluffier icing here to be more to their taste. I missed the slight sharpness and silky density of the cream cheese, but didn’t mind the alternative. The tiramisu was better than many I’ve had in Italian restaurants, with a great balance between the coffee, the chocolate, and whatever the creamy stuff was. But the triumph was undoubtably a chocolate ganache cake that was as dense, moist, sharp and sweet as the best examples you’ve had anywhere.

I could take most carnivores I know to Mildred’s and be confident they could find something across all three courses to satisfy their hunger. Vantra is not quite as easy a fit. Located in a basement on Wardour Street just off Leicester Square, its menu celebrates raw food, steaming and fermented food, all of which left me wishing we could continue a few hundred metres on to the heart of Chinatown. But with a friend to navigate the menu (the same one who introduced me to Mildred’s), we found some safe territory that was also delicious.

The standout here are their small plates that remind me of pintxos. Soya skewers with peanut sauce were indistinguishable from a good chicken sate. A mushroom skewer with ginger and black bean sauce billed as “lamb” had a taste profile remarkably like the Japanese smoked eel called unagi. It was the star dish of the night.

Before my two vegan dining experiences I was irritated by the appropriation of non-vegan words. Why are chicken, cheese, sausage, and burger used on a menu? Why not call it what it is? Now I understand that first it’s an expectation setting thing: we don’t have the vocabulary for the vegan concoctions, so we use the word that’s closest to give people some idea of what they’re ordering. Second is because it seems like the majority of descriptors on the menu would be tofu.

Mains at Vantra have much less variety than Mildred’s and are almost exclusively southeast Asian. If you’re up for a curry, they serve up delicious options. We tried some ice creams (obviously made from something other than egg and cream) in several varieties that were both strong on flavour and a good counter to the fiery curry that came before.

Overall I preferred Mildred’s. No matter how you dress it up, Vantra’s is still in a dark, pokey basement. That lowbrow environment doesn’t bring down the prices, however: £6.90 for those starters, barely two mouthfuls each, is a princely fee no matter how impressive the tofu transformation is. We were also served lukewarm beer and wine throughout the evening, which I assume was a one-off but is a large red flag. Vantra’s biggest advantage may be that it doesn’t take reservations and is a relatively niche cuisine in very busy part of town. So it might be an option when you can’t get in anywhere decent around Leicester Square.

These two restaurants have opened my eyes to the reality of vegan cuisine, something far different from the virtue-signalling deprivation I had imagined. Hosting a vegan dinner party is now on my list of New Year’s Resolutions for 2024. I still have one significant issue with the category, however.

My husband is allergic to tomato and dislikes anything particularly spicy. Beyond sushi and the occasional mild Chinese take-away, he’s not much of a fan of any Asian food. Yet Indian and Southeast Asian seem to be the bedrock of vegan cooking. Mildred’s would have had limited options for him but Vantra impossible. Yet my experience at both has broadened my thinking about what’s possible. I’m browsing recipes to learn more about the curious alchemy that elevates vegetables to a different plane. When I think about the people who produce delicious food from such a restricted list of ingredients, my respect has only grown.