LOL! Meatatarian is actually a word as much as vegetarian is a word. See this wikipedia article. It appears that the Inuit people are known meatatarians.
Anyway, this post is not about meat but it is about a vegetarian restaurant. I love my meat and I need meat everyday. If I don’t have meat for a day, it feels like I had not eaten. That is the main reason why I had not written much about Vegetarian restaurants.
Over the years we had only blogged on two vegetarian restaurants: Simply Vegetarian and Purity Vegetarian. Unfortunately both restaurants we wrote about had since closed.

When Buddha Boy and Buddha Girl invited us to join them in a vegetarian dinner, we immediately agreed. We enjoy going out and learning about cuisines that we are not familiar with.
The Spicy Vegetarian Restaurant we went to is located on No 3 Road and Browngate Road in Richmond. This is on the same strip mall as Jubilant, one of our family’s favourite restaurants.
Parking in this strip mall is difficult not only because it is small but this small strip mall had a few very popular restaurants. It is quite impossible to find parking during peak dining hours. So sometimes it is best to park across the street where there is a paid parking lot.
But you get a better chance parking if you go to Spicy Vegetarian. You see, some of the lots are reserved for certain restaurants and Spicy Vegetarian has a few lots that is not always taken. When we got there, there was a cone marker on the lot. We got someone to remove it by saying we are dining in Spicy Vegetarian.

The Spicy vegetarian Restaurant is of average size. There are about 10 tables of various size from 2 to 10 people per table. It is also clean and well maintained. Not many Chinese restaurants are this neat but I always expects that vegetarian restaurants are above other Chinese restaurants.
We met both Buddha Boy and Buddha Girl for the very first time that night. They are relatively new bloggers on Food for Buddha. I only found out lately that Buddha Boy had been following chowtimes for a long time and had posted many comments under another handle. Both Buddha Girl and Buddha Boy are knowledgeable about food, particularly Chinese food. They came from families with a background in the business. So it is great to hang around them because they are such an information trove.
Buddha Girl made reservations for four people that night. However when we went in none of the tables that had the “Reserved” sign were for us. Instead we were asked to get seated on one of the free tables. As I understand it, the tables marked “Reserved” were specially for their VIP customers from the temple or something like that.






We left all the ordering to the experts. What I was very interested in is trying vegetarian food that is made to look like meat. LOL! Yeah, I am just amazed at how vegetarian cuisine had progress to such a state that they can create food like that.
Anyway, their top dishes is on the top left menu above. So it you are not sure what to order, you might want to consider those dishes.
Here is a couple of tidbits of information we learned:
Vegetarian restaurants are always the busiest on the 1st and 15th day of the Chinese lunar calendar. It is because those two days are designated as vegetarian days for some Buddhists.
In Taiwan, for Buddhists who follows the religion strictly, vegetarian dishes cannot have garlic, chives, green onion and cilantro. This is because they believe these vegetables … (more…)