Customer Reviews

Veg Out Vegetarian Guide to San Francisco Bay Area (Restaurant Guidebooks for Vegetarian and Vegan Diners)

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How can you write a guide to vegetarian dining when you are hostile and condescending to vegetarians? This book is just a sloppy hatchet job from someone who doesn't appreciate anything about vegetarian dining. I got this guide as a birthday gift. As a Bay Area vegetarian I have eaten at many of the restaurants listed in the guide, and I was really dismayed and shocked to read the reviews. I couldn't even recognize my favorite places. If I didn't know better, I'd never even bother to try many of the restaurants listed. The review of Slice of Life in Sebastopol makes it sound so horrible that I went there just to judge for myself. Surprise, surprise -- I found it to be a fun place where they have good food. Don't bother with this guide -- save your money and have a nice meal at one of the Bay Area's fine vegetarian restaurants.

This book is not very useful to vegans, at least compared to a quick Google search. As a vegan, some of the questions I would have liked to have seen answered in the restaurant reviews are: Is the breading on dish x at restaurant y vegan? Are there vegan dessert shops in the Bay Area? Is there a good cheeseless pizza, or a good pizza with vegan cheese, available at restaurant z? Can I find vegan dim sum in Chinatown? These types of questions go completely or sporadically unanswered in this book. In the introduction, the author states she is not a vegetarian, and perhaps these omissions are explained by her lack of a vegetarian perspective. Additionally, vegans may get skewed ideas on where the easiest and most interesting places for them to eat are since the vegetarian restaurants tend to get poorer ratings than the non-vegetarian restaurants with several vegetarian options and fewer, if any, vegan options. The book does seem to provide a decent list of venues suitable for lacto-ovo vegetarians dining with omnivores, but that information is probably not hard to come by for free elsewhere.

However, the restaurant location map in the back is very handy for planning where to eat during walking trips.

In summary, this book is not written from a vegetarian perspective, and particularly if you are a vegan, a Google search will quickly lead you to more useful information.

As someone who lives in the SF Bay Area, and frequented many of the restaurants reviewed in this guide, I was disappointed. While everyone has different tastes in foods, I particularly disagreed with her review of Shangri-La which ridiculed the menu and its grammar. Not everyone had the opportunity to grow up in the USA. Additionally, perhaps it is the nature of publishing or the dynamic flow of the restaurant business, but this guide is already out of date.

I skimmed through this book in a local bookstore-- VEGANS BEWARE. The authors of this book have no idea what they are talking about- for instance the crepes at All You Knead Cafe are listed as vegan fare. My girlfriend works at this restaurant and I am sorry to say the crepes have and always have had egg and milk in them. Definitely NOT vegan. Who knows how many other mistakes they made. If you're gonna write a book, do some friggin' research.....

I picked up this book when I first moved to San Francisco. As a vegan I was so excited to have it, but looking through it I was disappointed to find that there weren't many vegan restaurants and the reviews of the restaurants were not all that great. Well after being here a year I found that this book has a lot of restaurants left out, of course that could be because this book was printed in 2004. It is also frustrating that the majority of the places listed are not pure vegetarian places and certainly not vegan places. If you are completely new to the area this book is a decent starting place, but you would fare better with an internet search or picking up a Friends of the Animals Guide or Sf Natural Pages. This book has good potential but needs to be updated and written by a vegetarian who is not a snob!

The Veg Out Vegetarian Guide to the San Francisco Bay Area is a travelogue that prompts the response of "meh." One would expect it to be a comprehensive guide to vegetarian/vegan dining in the Bay Area. Sonoma County has a bounty of such establishments; even places like the Pica Pica Venezuelan street food restaurant in Napa has vegetarian options.

Veg Out is somewhat helpful. Unfortunately,it NEEDS to be updated. Santa Rosa now has Seed-a vegan restaurant that offers takeout. A surprising omission is the Cafe Gratitude raw food vegan chain which has two locations in San Francisco,one in San Rafael,one in Berkeley,and one in Healdsburg. There's no mention of the Tibetan restaurants in Sonoma and Sebastopol that offer vegetarian meals. Luckily,the book mentions vegetarian dining at the Green Gulch Zen Center on Highway One in Marin County and the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas in Ukiah (it's excellent,authentic Chinese cuisine!)

Veg Out needs to be updated. It's biggest weaknesses are its condescending style and its format. It's not that easy to read. It could be wonderful,instead it's blah,like a block of tofu.