The Undercover Vegetarian: Trois Mec

Planning a super special occasion for your vegetarian love (or your vegetarian self) can be a challenge when it comes to dining. Sure, most good restaurants now have plenty of vegetarian options, and yes, if you were to head to any of the city's best restaurants you could pull together enough meat-free dishes to make something work.

But sometimes, the collection of sides gets old. Sometimes, you want something really special, something along the lines of the tasting menus that meat-eaters enjoy.

Trois Mec, the new teeny tasting menu-only restaurant from Ludo Lefebvre, Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo (and subject of this week's restaurant review), provides vegetarians with such an option. While their 5-course menu is set every evening and does not allow substitutions, they do offer a vegetarian option. They can not accommodate vegans, nor can they make special meals for people with specific allergies, and you must let them know in advance if you wish to eat the vegetarian option (by emailing at the time you make the reservation).

I wasn't able to get there for the full vegetarian tasting, but I will say that the vegetarian dishes on the regular menu were often just as compelling, and just as delicious, as the other food. Lefebvre's one dish that hasn't changed since opening is a plate of potato pulp — if you can trust a chef to make people swoon over potato pulp, you're in good hands.

In fact, the thing that made a plate of carrots and avocado so fantastic one evening was that the carrots were treated very much like meat — Lefebvre had barbecued them, bringing out all of their sweetness and depth, then paired them with contrasting elements: avocado, yogurt, blood orange, watercress.

For the right vegetarian, tickets to Trois Mec could be the blowout meal they've always longed for.

See also:

– The Undercover Vegetarian archives.

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