Chefs Creating Vegetarian Dishes with Equal Love and Dedication

In the spring of 2011, American fine dining was in the middle of a quiet reversal: after a decade of intense meat worship, serious chefs were procuring, preparing and serving vegetables with the same devotion they had previously reserved for heritage pork and marrow bones.

The puzzle they were trying to solve was how to make an all-vegetable meal feel like dinner — to give diners that "sink your teeth into it" satisfaction. Clark Frasier, whose Arrows restaurant in Ogunquit, Maine was about to premiere a vegetable tasting menu, put it this way: "How do you make the 'sink your teeth into it' part of it, that makes you think, okay, I had dinner now?"

For New York chef Dan Barber of Blue Hill, one answer was to stop apologizing for vegetables and cook them with the techniques that built flavor in meat dishes — roasting, charring, smoking — until a cauliflower steak with quinoa could hold the center of the plate on its own.

Vegetables were no longer the garnish. They were the point.

Reporting: The Wall Street Journal, April 1, 2011 ("Meet the Meaty Veggies").