Juliet Bredon Checks Out Peking’s Latest Vegetarian Restaurant in 1920…

Big news in 1920 – a vegetarian restaurant opened in Peking….Juliet Bredon was so excited she added a footnote to her book Peking (1920) noting its opening…(of course it was not the first restaurant to serve this sort of food, but probably the first to attract foreign interest…)

‘A newly opened vegetarian restaurant is one of the novelties of the capital. Not only is every vegetable known to China prepared there, but these vegetables are served in imitation of practically every known meat dish. At a recent feast given in this place, 27 different varieties of Chinese food were served. The roast duck consisted of a preperation made of bean curd; fried eels were the rind of a certain kinf od melon cooked in vegetable oils; vegetable pork and beef were found to consist of bamboo shoots and mushrooms, and so on, the novelty of the entertainment being that the vegetables not only tasted like the various meat dishes but were moulded to look them also.’