Sham vegan restaurants extremely busted

The Vegan Joint: Home to lies, deception and shellfish

If you’ve got a serious allergy, you’re probably savvy enough to steer clear of most restaurants – just in case. But let’s say you were allergic to peanuts, and a new cafe opened that was called “The Huge Peanut-Free Dining Palace.” And assuming the name didn’t weird you out, would you eat there? Probably.

Consider, then, the outrage of many a vegan when an undercover investigation of 17 LA area restaurants, many of which have the word vegan in their name, dug up some nasty ingredient secrets. Of the 17 joints, seven had “overload” levels of non-vegan ingredients, meaning there was no space for margin of error. The food quite simply wasn’t animal-product-free.

The blogging team over at QuarryGirl.com launched the ambitious effort: sterile lab conditions, industrial food testing kits and airtight take-out containers were all involved, along with $1,000 of their own cash. In fact, the testing standards exceeded the requirements of the California Retail Food Code and were accurate down to parts-per-million.

And in an ironic twist, six of the failed restaurants portend to be so explicitly vegan, their name touts an all-veg status: Vegan House, Lotus Vegan, California Vegan, LA Vegan Thai, Vegan Joint and Green Leaves Vegan. These restaurants were busted serving food that contained milk, casein (a milk derivative) and shellfish.

My “favorite” busted item? This cowboy pancake topped with faux bacon and vegan cheese, from LA Vegan Thai. But mostly just because, if you’re actually ordering a pancake layered with fake bacon and cheese from a Thai restaurant, I almost think you deserve it. Almost.

But you don’t. And diners deserve better than to be misled about the ingredients in their food. First of all, we’re paying for what we see on the menu, and if you’re like me, you’re at that restaurant because you want to support a vegan establishment. But on a sidenote, the FDA lists the three hidden ingredients on a list of eight that cause 90 percent of allergic reactions. Shouldn’t a vegan restaurant be a place where families need not bring the Epi-Pen for Little Suzie and her fatal anaphylactic shellfish allergy? And shouldn’t my husband and I be able to eat cowboy pancakes topped with fake bacon without compromising our principles?

Restaurant know-it-alls out there: Am I just naive to think that my food is what the menu tells me? Is nothing in resto-world sacred anymore? The thought of shellfish in my vegan sushi is just a little too extreme for me…