VEGETARIANISM: THE MEAT OF THE MATTER

“I often don’t enjoy dining out,” wrote Barbara Wong of Corona del Mar in a letter to this column recently, “because there is very little on most menus for me to eat.”

Why does Wong have this difficulty? “I am an ovo-lacto vegetarian,” she explains, “which, as you may know, means I include eggs and milk products in my diet, but no seafood, meat or poultry.” Often, she continues, she is the only vegetarian in a part of four or six diners: “Naturally, I don’t choose the restaurant and even if I did, I’d want to try many kinds.”

When out with meat-eating friends, she says, she quietly tells the waiter or waitress about her dietary requirements and sometimes asks for suggestions. “Once I got the answer that I should go to a health food restaurant nearby,” she notes. “Another time I was told that the server in a partly filled restaurant would see if the chef ‘had time’ to do a vegetable plate for me.” Wong feels unfairly treated, rues the fact that “very few restaurants have any meatless entrees on their menus,” and opines that “any chef that deserves that title ought to know something about nutrition and ought to be creative enough to come up with some good . . . dishes to assuage the hunger, both visceral and sensual, of the vegetarians in the Southland.”

Now, I personally think that vegetarianism (unless religiously inspired, of course) is a little bit silly. (I always want to ask vegetarians, who don’t want to kill animals for food, what their belts and shoes and handbags are made of--and if they answer “plastic,” as they occasionally do, then I always want to ask them if they’re absolutely sure that adding more non-biodegradable petroleum-based products to the environment is morally preferable to following that primal law of nature that says that big fish eat little fish and so on down the line.)

On the other hand, I firmly believe that there’s absolutely no reason in the world why anybody should eat anything he or she doesn’t want to eat, or doesn’t like, or doesn’t want to like. If Wong wants to be an ovo-lactarian, that’s absolutely fine with me. If she wanted to live on anchovy spines and hyena liver, that would be too. But she and other strict vegetarians must realize, I think, that--right or wrong--we happen to live in an overwhelmingly carnivorous society. She is the exception to the rule, even in Southern California, and I think she ought to be realistic enough to realize that.

I must stress that I am not putting down her culinary preferences--but they are hers , and it is simply not fair of her to expect non-vegetarian establishments to cater to her requirements. A waiter who responds to a polite request for a vegetarian entree by telling the customer to go to a health food restaurant, of course, is a bad waiter. But one who offers to see if the chef “has time” to do something special, I think, is acting reasonably--and I don’t think Wong has any business questioning the abilities of a chef who doesn’t happen to be able to cater to what are after all her dietary whims.

In any case, there are certainly a good number of vegetarian restaurants in Los Angeles and Orange counties, and, as Wong herself admits, vegetarian dishes may be found on Mexican, Chinese and Indian menus (though I’m surprised to hear that Thai restaurants she’s tried don’t have many vegetable dishes; the ones I go to have plenty of them). She may well have to work a little harder to find the things she wants to eat and to look a little harder--but, then, she eats the way she does out of a sense of principle (she says), and principles always have a price.

RESTAURANT STEW: The Snow Creek Bar & Grill is new in West Covina, bringing homemade pasta with lamb sausage, catfish cakes, and pork tenderloin with port and figs (among other things) to that community for what I suspect is the first time. (Shari Vollmer, one-time chef at San Pedro’s innovative Grand House, is executive chef and operations consultant.) . . . The Century City Tavern Restaurant has opened on Santa Monica Boulevard, offering Yugoslavian and American fare. . . . There’s a new “French bistro” menu at Piret’s on Robertson and Olympic. . . . Scratch in Santa Monica has launched a full-scale catering service. . . . A new series of Saturday afternoon “conversations” with a wide range of noted personalities has begun at 72 Market Street in Venice. Anthropologist Mel Konner, blues singer John Hammond and monologuist Spalding Gray are among the guests scheduled to appear. . . . LA ala Carte, a “Gourmet Dinner Club,” has been created by the proprietors of the Foodsource Hotline. The first event is a dinner at the Studio Grill in Hollywood on Tuesday, featuring a 1979 Chateau Mouton Rothschild, a 1959 Anjou Blanc, etc. Total cost is $70 per person. Call (213) 930-0893 for details. . . . Also Tuesday, Bruce Neyers brings wines from the Joseph Phelps winery and his own Neyers winery to MacArthur Park in Huntington Beach for a special five-course dinner at $45 per person. . . . Emilio’s in Hollywood has extended its “pasta grazings,” now offered from 5 to 9 p.m. every Sunday, through the end of December.

THE OUT-OF-TOWNERS: Beverly Hills’ (and the Beverly Center’s) own California Pizza Kitchen has announced plans to open its first out-of-state branch, in April, at Lennox Square in Buckhead, just outside of Atlanta. . . . Closer to home, Ruth’s Chris Steak House (of Beverly Hills) will open, also in April, at California and Van Ness in San Francisco. . . . Kenji Seki, former manager of Chinois on Main in Santa Monica, has turned up in New York, where he is plotting the April (when else?) debut of his own restaurant on the ground floor of the CBS building at 48th and Avenue of the Americas. . . . And noted young New York French chef Daniel Boulud, soon to take over the kitchen at Le Cirque, put in a brief appearance in this column several weeks ago as Daniel “Bolout.”