Review: La Belle Vert offers elevated vegetarian and vegan food

• 166 Eddy St. Old Hull

• Appetizers: $6.95 to $10.50

• Mains:$11.50 to $15.95

• Diet: Vegan, vegetarian, raw, gluten free

• Wheelchair accessibility: Yes

• Liquor Licensed: No

• Website

As with most food reviews, the guests who attended with Ralf will remain anonymous.

We may not like it but there's politics to everything. Even in food, it's easy to get drawn into the debate about the pros and cons of various diets and sometimes it gets fractious. The preparing and serving of food however is also a supreme act of nurturing and an expression of love.

Among friends I've long advocated for supporting local farms and getting away from factory farmed meat consumption. Eat less, pay more, eat better sums it up. We'll all get to where we need to be with our nourishment, eventually.

Belle Verte on Eddy Street in Old Hull makes that process deliciously easy. For fourteen years this cozy bistro has been giving locals and travellers an elevated vegan/vegetarian experience and I'm glad to have discovered it when I did.

My favorite wine writer and Master of Wine, Jancis Robinson, has long said what she loves about wine is that she never stops learning. I concur and nothing makes me happier in the realm of food than to have my preconceptions shattered. I simply want to know more. All the time.

My friend S became a vegetarian years ago and we got together with our mutual friend C at Belle Verte for a quick lunch. We've known each other for many decades but hadn't been in the same room for almost 25 years. It was a get together for body and soul as it turned out.

C, who is never happier at the table than when consuming some form of pork, ordered the same tofu/mushroom burger as me while S enjoyed the Le King lentil burger. These sandwiches were served on magnificent flat, eight-grain buns with carrots, tomatoes, sauerkraut, pickles, cucumbers, onions, vegan mayonnaise and other individual toppings for each of the burgers.

Interestingly it was the notorious carnivore C first out of the gate, declaring how much he loved the tofu mushroom burger and how delicious it was. I could do nothing but agree and in fact returned the next week to try more of their food. I may have been wrong but I thought I heard S mumble some sort of expletive in his appreciation for his lentil burger. In fact, halfway through the meal, S ordered a sandwich wrap for his train ride home.

Perhaps out of a desperate need for some much needed fibre, C was the first to finish his plate but I was heartened that even he could enjoy a cuisine so foreign to him. It may have been an unconventional way for old friends to finally get together but it was nothing less than memorable.

Fourteen years ago, Belle Verte started out as a vegan restaurant, but due to many requests, the then owners added two dishes featuring a locally made sheep's milk cheese. Five years later and after graduating from the Centre Relais de la Lievre culinary school in Buckingham, Que., Maxine Phillips purchased Belle Verte.

The woman has a deeply creative mind and takes her inspirations from pictures on Instagram as well as traditional recipes that she feels she can recreate without the use of meat. Take her texturely luscious and flavourful Faux Gras appetizer that was as good a veggie cracker spread as any I've had, and better than most.

Her squash soup, like the vegan soups of the sadly defunct Moringa in Ottawa, lacked for nothing in flavor and was accompanied by a raw golden flax seed cracker held together by a puree of sun dried tomatoes. Just fantastic, and it’s exposure to this cooking that gave me renewed inspiration for home.

Before I move on to dessert, a word about the Belle Verte kimchi: get some of this in you and you'll become an umami addict. I already have enough of a problem with umami cravings and now on both occasions I've regretted not buying one of their take-home jars. It's not as hot as the Korean versions, and contains a broader variety of vegetables other than just the traditional napa cabbage, but it is vegan and intensely lip-smacking.

Belle Verte does offer a full range of frozen and packaged take home dishes and you may want to explore their selection before you leave. Their food is that good (if you haven't guessed). As stated on their website: “Whether you are vegetarian, vegan, glucose or lactose intolerant, or not, or on a raw food diet, get your health fix at La Belle Verte restaurant.”

I'm not much for desserts after a meal unless they involve fruit but every once in a while, I'm compelled to try something new. I hit the big time when I tried their vegan lemon, raspberry, chocolate layer cake. The base consisted of a thin golden flax sweetened with agave syrup, a dense and satisfyingly lemony cashew layer, a raspberry mouse possibly made with agar-agar (gelatin from seaweed) and a high quality chocolate layer. Stick this in front of the most dairy-driven dessert aficionado and they would have difficulty distinguishing it from desserts made with cream and butter.

We know that food fads come and go but cuisines have staying power. Vegetarianism, to my reading, has been with us in the west for well over a hundred years and while vegan cuisine may be newer, it is no flash in the pan. As professional chefs and home cooks continue to experiment more with ingredients employing newer techniques, it's exciting to contemplate all the great new textures and flavors we'll get to enjoy. Best of all and the cherry on top – it's all an expression of love.