IT IS Saturday night and I am cooking for friends. I pour three glasses of red and carefully lay the fillet steaks in the pan. A crust begins to form as the carbohydrates caramelise. A few minutes on each side and they are ready. I bite through the crunchy exterior into a juicy centre that fills my mouth with a delicious hint of umami. I smile at my friends. I have managed to cook the steaks perfectly – and I have a clear conscience. No cow died for our enjoyment and the greenhouse gas emissions were minimal. Our fillet steaks were entirely made from plants.
Vegan food is having a moment. McDonald’s, Subway and Burger King have all launched vegan products in recent years, Impossible’s “chicken” nuggets and “sausage” patties are sold in UK pubs, and the plant-based section of my supermarket has become an aisle. But something is missing. The processed food and fast food markets are well catered for, but what about those of us who would prefer to tuck into a filet mignon than a Filet-O-Fish?
I’m talking about fine dining. For me it is a real treat, a licence to eat beautiful ingredients or experience extraordinary meals that I could never cook myself. Increasingly, though, this indulgent pursuit is starting to feel, well, overindulgent.
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Historically, fine dining involves a lot of planet-destroying meat and dairy, and .
The good news is that vegan foods are spreading to the fine-dining world. But what does vegan haute cuisine look like, and can it compete with traditional cordon bleu?
To answer those questions, we first need to consider what makes luxury food so luxurious. Let’s start with the simplest explanation: the ingredients themselves. To many Western palates, fine dining has long been associated with high-quality meat, fish and dairy.
One way to emulate this is by creating plant-based foods inspired by these traditional luxuries. Visit Délice & Sarrasin in New York, for instance, and you can try its crabless crab cakes made from dehydrated lemon peel, yellow pepper and seaweed, or go to Gauthier Soho in London to sample “faux gras” made from walnuts, lentils and cognac.
To get even closer to the real deal, food companies are working on recreating luxury foods themselves. My plant-based filet mignon was made by , a US start-up that attempts to recreate the texture and prized fat marbling of high-end cuts of meat with layers of soya and wheat protein fibres, mimicking the musculature of meat. My friends and I felt it was more akin to salt beef than fillet steak.
Plant-based “meat” does have the seal of approval from , chef patron of Gauthier Soho, which was awarded a Michelin star in 2011. He uses a product from Redefine Meat in one of his dishes, and is impressed. “They’ve managed to recreate this fattiness that is perfectly integrated within the fibre,” he says.
Other companies are hot on their heels, creating (made of kelp), (created from seawater, algae and rice infused with a fermented culture) and (made using wheat gluten, rice flour, coconut oil and beetroot).
But when it comes to precisely replicating high-end meats, one technique goes above and beyond: cell-cultured meat. This is food made using stem cells taken from an animal and coaxed into becoming the muscle, fat and connective tissue that comprise regular meat. The cells are grown around edible scaffolds to recreate the various cuts of meat we are used to. They may not be vegan, but they get close to being cruelty free.
The first meal made from lab-cultured chicken cells was sold at 1880, a members’ club in Singapore in 2020, and there are now several start-ups around the world racing to produce all sorts of foodstuffs in a similar way, including caviar and foie gras.
But while the ingredients themselves are a big draw, they aren’t the only element that creates a high-end dining experience. “Luxury has to be something that lots of people desire and, at the same time, most people don’t have access to,” says at the University of Leicester, UK, who has studied food’s role in human culture.
Inaccessibility can be a product of rarity – a tin of from a sturgeon carrying a rare gene for albinism, for example, or a of a subspecies classed as vulnerable because of low stocks. It can also be a result of resource-intensive production methods. Japanese Wagyu beef is widely seen as the pinnacle of such meat thanks to its superior juiciness and tenderness from the marbled fat running through it. This intramuscular fat distribution is related to heat stress and diet, says , global beef ambassador for the US Meat Export Federation, which is why the cows are protected from the heat and fed sumptuous food. Japan’s Olive Wagyu cows, for example, are fed on inawara rice straw, Italian ryegrass and pressed olive pulp. Just a few are slaughtered each month.
The vegan answer might be to create rarity by controlling what and how much gets made of any single item. For instance, Gauthier says that exclusivity could be maintained by making a line of cultured cells from “the best Kobe Wagyu cow”, and then restricting its use to maintain scarcity and exclusivity.
There are also many non-meat foods that are incredibly rare and are highly prized in some cultures, which would lend themselves well to a more sustainable fine-dining establishment. In Japan, for instance, certain kinds of melon would give Wagyu cows a run for their money in terms of labour-intensive production. Crown muskmelons are hand-reared for 100 days with extreme care, and fitted with caps to prevent sunburn.
Read more: Living on the veg: Should we all go vegan?
But exclusivity isn’t solely about ingredients or how expensive they might be. It is also about who is stirring the pot and the story they tell. Chefs like Heston Blumenthal or Ferran Adrià won their restaurants’ Michelin stars through their innovative approaches to fine dining. Vegan restaurateurs wanting to emulate this kind of success know their pulling power must arise not only from the ingredients they use, but also the uniqueness of the experience they offer. “I feel like I’m a scientist not a chef,” says head chef Elena Savchuk of , a vegan restaurant in Knightsbridge, London.
The playfulness and storytelling that often combine to create the perfect high-end meal can easily be emulated in vegan restaurants. For instance, one of the tasting menus served at ONA, France’s first Michelin-starred vegan restaurant, is inspired by Homer’s Odyssey, thanks to head chef first calling as an archaeologist.
And, of course, any ingredient can be elevated to luxury status in the right hands. Think of a turnip grown in the specific terroir of the chef’s kitchen garden, harvested at the perfect point in the season, on the day it was served, before being transformed into 10 wildly different morsels that delight the tongue and surprise the eyes. “The rarity is the creativeness,” says Gauthier. “It’s in the brain of the chef being inspired by the look of the ingredient, by its smell, by where you stand on the planet at which time of the year. It’s luxurious because you can’t duplicate it.”
The new luxury is a meal you can’t enjoy anywhere else on Earth, says an industry insider familiar with Michelin guidelines, who wished to remain anonymous. “Today, it’s not about an expensive product, luxury food is about what you can only eat in one single place,” they say.
Social context is also vital for any fine-dining experience. As uncomfortable as it might be to admit, luxury foods still flag social status. High-end restaurants come with unwritten rules about which cutlery to use, the order of dishes, the silver service and glassware, and the cachet of getting a table in the first place. “Going to those kinds of places and having a reservation a year in advance, that’s a social signifier of status,” says , a cognitive psychologist at the University of Glasgow, UK, whose .
For those at the vanguard of the veganfine-dining movement, it is essential that this entire experience is maintained. When Gauthier made his restaurant menu at Gauthier Soho entirely vegan after the covid-19 lockdowns, he knew he couldn’t steer too far from what his customers had previously enjoyed (see “From Michelin-starred meat to luxury vegan fare”, below). A key part of this was preserving the trappings of the traditional experience: the crystal, the sommelier and the maître d’ lovingly describing the ingredients – and not forgetting the elevated price. “We want customers to leave still thinking that they’d had the most luxurious gastronomic French experience they had hoped for,” says Gauthier.
This focus on maintaining the perception of luxury is smart for recruiting more people to plant-based diets, says Papies. Research has shown that, beyond the taste experience, the occasion and when they think of food.
As for me, I am excited by a whole new world of plant-based luxury meals that I have never experienced before. I have yet to taste Blumenthal’s “Meat Fruit” (a “mandarin” made of real foie gras enveloped in orange jelly peel). It is heartening to know that I no longer need to – it is possible to enjoy this level of culinary creativity without the moral or environmental hangover the next day.
From Michelin-starred meat to luxury vegan fare
Alexis Gauthier’s Damascene moment came after reading Գپéٱ by Aymeric Caron, a book about putting animals on an equal level with humans. He now refers to all animals like he would a person. “I closed the book and decided that I will never ever eat someone who has lived and then died,” says Gauthier.
He initially struggled to square his veganism with his career as a classically trained French chef, but, one by one, he removed animal products from his menu. When he reopened after the covid-19 lockdowns, Gauthier’s London restaurant was 100 per cent vegan.
“It was an amazing challenge,” he says. Discoveries included finding that a sauce’s flavour doesn’t have to be derived from the animal, but can come from what it had been feeding on. This meant a reduced lamb jus could be recreated with mosses and mushrooms the lamb would eat, reduced alongside the fat from plant-based meat alternatives.
He serves a dish called Tomorrow, a cube of meatless lamb shank, made of wheat, soya and potato protein, treated with the reverence and presented with all the accoutrements its real-meat counterpart would command.
New approaches also include aubergine as the starting point for patisserie and developing a way of treating a watermelon so it has the texture of meat. “It’s just like the muscle of an animal,” says Gauthier. “This is what we were meant to eat. Something we can pick, something we can take from a branch. Not something we’ve killed.”
