No Meat, No Limits

As vegan and vegan-adjacent diets increase globally, restaurateurs catering to the no-meat crowd face a conundrum: what type of eatery do they want to run? Some opt to win over the vegan-curious with familiar flavors. Others strike out in the opposite direction — unabashedly putting plants front and center. Others still take the How can this be vegan? approach. Below, Travel in Taiwan presents worthy Taipei contenders from each camp.

UncleQ by Veganday

With over 30 years of being the token flesh forgoer in any given group, I’m familiar with the vegan dilemma. Go along with the plans and end up eating white rice and boiled veg, or suggest somewhere and risk not getting invited to the next meetup. Well, Taipei vegans rejoice, because UncleQ by Veganday has you covered – robust flavors, generous portions, and dishes that are comforting in their familiarity, it’s precisely the kind of place that converts committed carnivores over a shared meal.

The restaurant’s bright, urban-contemporary interior lies hidden behind the plain frontage of a corner property in the back lanes of Daan District. In the open kitchen, the chefs bust out toothsome dishes with a health-kick heart and fast-food soul. The menu leans Western, the ingredients are local, and there’s no attempt at subterfuge involving the use of fake meat. Many items are gluten-free, and Buddhist vegans who eschew alliums and alcohol are also catered for, although onion and garlic can be added upon request.

A veganified take on beef bourguignon is the store’s signature dish. The traditional beef has been swapped out for flavorful chunks of lion’s mane mushroom (a mushroom that hasn’t been told it’s not actually meat), which swim in a rich, umami red-wine gravy alongside sweet wedges of carrot, sauce-infused potato, and glistening, near-translucent slivers of onion. Other standouts include the deep-fried wontons – little parcels of herby cashew cheese, crisped to perfection, served on a slick of piquant tomato sauce – and the warm salad with organic kale and a creamy smoked-paprika hummus. It’s good, hearty stuff, and lends itself well to sharing with friends or family.

Even those for whom pudding is non-negotiable will not be disappointed. A sweet array of desserts includes crowd-pleasers like tiramisu (crunchy base, pillowy cream, and moist, gluten-free sponge), cinnamon rolls, and seasonal-fruit ice-cream sundaes. No matter your veganhood status, there’s no way you’re leaving with any space in your belly.

UncleQ by Veganday
Tel: (02) 2356-8095
Add: 1F, No. 105, Chaozhou St., Da’an Dist., Taipei City
(台北市大安區潮州街105號1樓)
Hours:
Wed-Fri 11:30am-2:30pm, 5:30pm-9pm
Sat & Sun 11am-3:30pm, 5:30pm-9pm
FB: www.facebook.com/uncleqvegan
IG: www.instagram.com/uncleqveganday

Darling Same Young

If UncleQ is ideal for those who require gradually easing into meat-free cuisine, Darling Same Young Vegan Bistro is the place you take your vegan friends when you want to let them know they are seen, understood, and loved. The downtown offshoot of an organic mountainside farm, it serves up vegan cuisine in which the plants are the undisputed stars, and the descriptors “wholesome” and “heartfelt” roundly apply.

Opened in 2021, the eatery occupies a compact end-terrace property down a side lane in the quietly cosmopolitan Tianmu neighborhood, easily missable if not for the orange trim work brightening its exterior and the accumulation of curios crowding the small yard. Inside, the founder’s guiding principle of reciprocal nourishment between man and mountain shines through in every detail. The food’s local origins and the labor involved in creating it are anchored front of mind thanks to the decorative elements – preserving jars work their magic in plain sight, dried gourds form an organic curtain between dining and prep areas, and tools that have done serving their original purpose are given a second chance (like the toilet-roll holder fashioned from what looks to be an old paint roller).

In terms of food, this translates to thoughtful dishes celebrating fresh, local, seasonal produce. The signature main is a rice bowl – a vegetable medley, which includes over a dozen plants: bright string beans, crisp slices of lotus root, crunchy and juicy chayote, rich taro, succulent radish, and a characterful carrot, all lightly roasted so as to coax out their innate sweetness and personalities. This bounty sits beside a mound of organic brown rice from Chishang Township, flavored to perfection with a savory spice mix, with vibrant pops from fresh red peppercorn tying the plate together visually. Simple though it may be, there is something orchestral in the way the components combine to form something greater than their individual parts, and I know it sounds a little silly to say this, but I hadn’t tasted such delicious, distinctively “vegetabley” vegetables in a long, long time.

Also on the menu, you’ll find interesting oddities popping up in unexpected places. Gac fruit on pizza, winged beans in a stir-fry, olive oil in ice cream. One spaghetti dish makes particularly good use of ailanthus prickly ash – a flavor accent in some indigenous cuisines. It unmistakably gives lemony, peppery notes to the indulgent pesto sauce. Sweet potato sneaks into the dessert menu to assume the starring role as the main ingredient in a dense, nostalgic caramel pudding. It is not the kind of food that one can shovel down without thought – the flavors are complex, intriguing, and at times surprising, but the care that has gone into each decision is evident in every perfectly balanced bite.

The drinks menu manifests a similar thoughtful approach. Of particular note is the wide range of fermented beverages available – a whole page in the menu is dedicated to homemade brown rice vinegar sodas, kombuchas, and fruit enzyme drinks. But if gut-friendly fizz is not your thing, you might want to pick from the selection of premium Taiwan teas (processed anaerobically to boost the gamma aminobutyric acid levels – a chemical that’s known to promote relaxation), coffees, or the nourishing kale and pineapple smoothie.

As someone who has been riding the plant-based wave for decades, this place excites me because it feels like an evolution – the next generation of vegan cooking. There’s absolutely no concession made for the absence of meat, because why should there be? This is what can happen when chefs stop asking how to recreate and mimic. Instead, they ask what will make this ingredient shine, and Darling Same Young has the answer.

Darling Same Young | 大人山養
Tel: (02) 2835-1755
Add: No. 11, Lane 50, Huangxi St., Shilin District, Taipei City
(台北市士林區磺溪街50巷11號)
Hours:
Wed 11:30am-2:30pm, 5:30pm-7:30pm
Fri & Sat 11:30am-2:30pm, 5:30pm-9pm
Sun 11:30am-2:30pm
FB: www.facebook.com/darlingsameyoung
IG: www.instagram.com/darlingsameyoung

Green Bakery

With plant-based diets solidifying their mainstream role, old vegan stereotypes are fading fast. But even though it’s no longer just lentils, martyrdom, and sad cheese substitutes, no one is claiming it’s all decadent desserts and perfect puddings either.

Except, perhaps, at Green Bakery.

A designer in a former life, Isabella Cao still refers to herself as an amateur baker despite having spent the last decade pioneering Taiwan’s vegan baking scene. Sitting in the calming interior of her Minsheng Community bakery-cum-café, Cao outlined her trajectory from vegan awakening to dessert doyen. The 2005 docu-horror, Earthlings, was her catalyst, precipitating a reassessment of her relationship to animals that led to her decision to turn vegan. However, as anyone who has ever attempted to make dietary changes well knows, choosing not to eat a thing does not diminish your desire for it – in fact, often the opposite. So, one day, when a hankering for Western-style desserts proved impossible to satisfy, Cao realized there was a gap in the market.

Given that she had no culinary background, what followed this realization was a whole lot of learning, but rather than finding the challenge daunting, Cao saw her novice starting point as a boon. “I wasn’t hemmed in by conventional ways of thinking,” she explains. Through trial and error, she learned to bend ingredients to her will – pumpkin makes a mean egg substitute in a sponge, sweet potato whips up into a shockingly creamy consistency, and when color is called for, there is a whole rainbow of plants to pick from. Each new recipe had to be built from scratch, and although vegans typically frown on animal experimentation, Cao needed a guinea pig for her new creations – a role her husband was more than happy to fulfill. All I can say is that I’m grateful for his service, because Cao is now a master of her craft and the results are so successful that some patrons come in and enjoy a cake and a coffee without ever noticing (or caring) that the store is entirely plant-based.

Visit Green Bakery, and you’ll find the results of this ongoing experimentation displayed in the glass-fronted cabinet of delights. Quite frankly, the best piece of advice I can give you is to take a friend or two, because it would be a nightmare trying to pick just a single sweet treat to sample. During a recent Travel in Taiwan visit, we nibbled our way through a smorgasbord of tasty morsels, and not a single one was a miss.

Personal favorites were the tiramisu and the chocolate cake – both of which make unexpected use of tofu. The former is a lightly elegant confection of creamy deliciousness that would pair wonderfully with something from the coffee menu. The latter is a dense and exceptionally moist mouthful topped with silken ganache and studded with pinenuts. The ruby grapefruit and peach tart offers a fresh fruity foil to all that richness, and would match nicely with a pot of tea. Meanwhile, for those who subscribe to the camera eats first philosophy of culinary exploration, the Yushan tart is for you. Named after Taiwan’s highest peak, this visually intriguing showstopper marries refreshing lemon with a rich seam of black sesame, and has sweet-potato leaves embedded in its green-flecked base.

There’s seemingly no baked good that is off-limits. Flaky croissants, creamy Basque cheese cakes, scones – if you’ve got a pet pudding, odds are, Cao can make it vegan. And if you find yourself inspired to recreate any of these at home, she has made that easier too by publishing a cookbook sharing her recipes. All the evidence points to the fact that Cao is on a one-woman mission to prove veganism does not need to equate to asceticism. At Green Bakery, you can have your vegan cake and eat it.

Green Bakery | 綠帶純植物烘焙
Tel: (02) 2747-7668
Add: 1F, No. 64, Aly. 8, Ln. 36, Sec. 5, Minsheng E. Rd., Songshan Dist., Taipei City
(台北市松山區民生東路五段36巷8弄64號1樓)
Hours: 12pm-8pm
Website: www.greenvbakery.com
FB: www.facebook.com/greenvbakery
IG: www.instagram.com/greenvbakery