You Don’t Eat Meat? Try the Sausage!

“You just want vegetables?” our waiter in the Gazebo Café in New Orleans asks. “Then you should try our red beans and rice.” He brings a tureen full of chicken and sausage pieces to the table.

Generally speaking, from the culinary point of view, travel is not especially enjoyable for vegetarians. Waiters either misunderstand them or can offer only a side salad, noodles drenched in tasteless tomato sauce or a piece of cake. Personally, I occasionally eat meat and fish — especially out of necessity — like when I’m on vacation. But since my traveling companion has been a strict vegetarian for 20 years, we often find ourselves in the same cramped boat when we travel: We have to find an eating place that has a vegetarian section on its menu.

That’s a challenge similar to looking for an inn in the Bavarian Alps that serves green smoothies. Of course, your destination plays a key role: Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia have never been a problem for vegetarians and India is a downright paradise for them. In many other nations, on the other hand, a lot of cooks immediately think of silage when you mention vegetables, and the cattle and pigs have long since devoured that and turned into the mountains of meat that have become these countries’ national dishes.

Argentina, with its asados, ranks as one of the biggest challenges, and it’s getting tougher in Venezuela and Colombia where even scrambled eggs are virtually unthinkable without some form of meat. At least in the United States, they’re ambivalent about meat.

In the U.S., what’s on the menu depends on the region you’re in. In New York or San Francisco vegetarians feel as if they are in heaven. Even vegans, who eat absolutely no animal products such as eggs or cheese, still have the luxury of being able to choose among many restaurants. In the Midwest and the South, meanwhile, they have more difficulty because the vegetarian menu isn’t just limited, it doesn’t exist.

In wonderful New Orleans the visitor can revel in Creole delicacies or discover the benefits of Cajun cooking — unless they won’t eat fish or meat. Regardless of which menu you look at, you see lobster, crayfish, catfish, chicken and shrimp. These are the main ingredients in dishes such as the rice stew called jambalaya and advertised as “vegetarian.” In addition, deep fried animals are also apparently very popular in the Southern states.

Many waiters seem to have never met a real flesh-and-blood vegetarian. One in Alabama asked us in disbelief, “Something vegetarian?” and then suggested a pasta and shrimp dish or a tuna steak. Quite often we hear, “No meat? All we have is French fries or a cheese pizza.” Undeniably valid suggestions, but should we eat nothing but fries and pizza for three solid weeks? Combing through the salad looking for bacon bits is also not especially enjoyable on an empty stomach.

Desperate, we turn to digital help and download an app called Happy Cow. As alternatives, there are also apps called Vegman or VeganXpress for those who want to avoid meat. The recommendations on Happy Cow made our culinary tour of the Southern states much more enjoyable.

Thanks to GPS, the app can tell where you are and recommend nearby restaurants in the categories vegan, vegetarian or vegetarian-friendly. The places it sent us to were all really quite good, but the app has just one drawback: In smaller towns, it often comes up with no suggestions.

Either no vegetarian eating places exist there or nobody has bothered to upload a vegetarian-friendly restaurant to the website. But so be it! Sometimes — but not all the time — there really isn’t anything better than fries with cake for dessert.