Changing Course

And sometimes I just go for pancakes. Vegetarian restaurants -- and now I'm talking about the Bohemian joints again, because the chrome-and-lacquer addresses would never deign to serve anything so pedestrian as breakfast -- seem to do pancakes unerringly well, and WaterCourse is no exception. Maybe that's because pancakes are one of the few foods on earth not improved by a demiglace or the inclusion of pork.

Whatever the explanation, WaterCourse makes a mean stack of flapjacks -- heavy and chewy and as serious as anything done in the diners and lumber camps where pancakes are not just a staple, but an entire food group. Go whole hog, so to speak, and order the special buckwheat pancakes topped with crunchy granola, sliced bananas and seasonal berries, and you can almost understand how a vegetarian can survive on his diet of twigs and berries without going mad, driving out to a stockyard and just taking a bite out of a cow.

WaterCourse has other worthy breakfast offerings. There's Amsterdam hash, which doesn't include what you think it might by the name, but instead consists of a big plate of grilled vegetables and homefries with eggs on top (tofu for the vegans) and "gravy" that tastes almost, but not completely, unlike anything resembling gravy. The breakfast burrito is passable when ordered without the tempeh chorizo -- a weighty mix of potatoes, almost buttery refried beans and scrambled, cage-free, vegetarian-fed, organic, hormone and antibiotic-free eggs splashed with green chile and cheese. And the N.Y.C. Scramble, with sundried tomatoes, spinach, roasted garlic, basil and brie, would be right at home on the finest breakfast menu.

Lunch and dinner can be more problematic. Beyond the occasional glitch in the apolitical mechanics of cooking (watery tomatoes causing the whole-wheat tortillas to go limp, an overpoweringly green and grassy pesto), I have concerns about the way certain entrees are conceptualized and executed. In its most basic applications, vegetarian cookery has always struck me as a cuisine of subtraction, in much the same way that Catholicism is a lifestyle of deprivation. Both exist, on a certain level, as a system of denial in expectation of future benefits. When I was a young boy, I was expected to sit quietly in church every Sunday for a couple of hours while a man in a funny hat explained to me all the things I was not allowed to do. No cursing, no coveting, no false idolatry -- all the usual stuff. He would tell stories about people who lived thousands of years ago who broke these rules and suffered for it, then more stories about other people who obeyed all the rules and, as a prize, got wings when they died and learned to play the harp. I didn't care much about the harp lessons, but the wings sounded pretty cool.

At a vegetarian restaurant, the process works much the same way. You sit down, are given a menu and told all the things you should not eat. There are Philly cheesesteaks at WaterCourse made with grilled seitan -- wheat gluten masquerading as meat -- rather than Steak-Ums because Steak-Ums are evil; tacos made with tempeh in place of barbacoa; tofu BBQ. And these all taste perfectly fine, even if they taste nothing like the food they're supposed to be mimicking. (Actually, I don't know what the seitan cheesesteak tastes like, since I've never been able to bring myself to order one -- not just because of the travesty of veggie-ing up such a classic sandwich, but also because it's served standard with mushrooms and bell peppers, which would be wrong even if the cheesesteak had meat in it). Still, having been raised in a mishmash of Catholic, Protestant and Lutheran traditions, I have an overdeveloped sense of guilt and punishment that causes me to believe if you're going to do something ridiculous like become a vegan, you should have to suffer for it by not getting to eat cheesesteaks. Even fake cheesesteaks. Even fake cheesesteaks without any cheese on them.

Besides, there are plenty of naturally occurring foods in the gustatory cosmos for vegetarians to eat without resorting to this nonsensical fakery. I don't go around demanding that my vegetables all come wrapped in steak, so why do vegetarians have to get their tofu done in a mockery of jerk chicken? Even that wonderful alfredo wasn't actually an alfredo by even the most forgiving of definitions, except that it looked kinda like an alfredo -- which is to say, white.