Every once in a while, you get stranded in a place where there is nothing to eat but whatever is available.  I went to the LaBrea tarpits and the LA County Museum of Art (LACMA) to do the usual touristy things that you do there, and it was about 2 pm and I was famished.  However, in that area there’s not anything really good within walking distance.  I parked my car in the parking lot of the tarpits, and didn’t want to move it until I saw everything.  Thus, I was compelled to try the Plaza Café in the LACMA.

The Plaza Café is your typical cafeteria-style eatery, with salad bar, sandwiches, as well as pizzas.  I saw that they had a veggie burger, and I decided to order it (I had just had a pizza the night before).  Unfortunately for me, the veggie burger was your typical Boca burger style fake meat veggie burger, rather than a more interesting vegetable patty.  The burger was served with these fries that took me a while to realize were garlic fries, because the garlic settled all at the bottom.  That was a very nice touch that I did not expect from a museum cafeteria.  The veggie burger was nothing spectacular but it was enough to satiate my appetite so that I could continue to check out the Japanese pavilion (very cool if you can still check it out), and the rest of the modern art wing of the museum.  If you’re ever going to LACMA and the tarpits, try to allot 4-5 hours to see it all, and possibly bring a sandwich next time.

Overall, the food at the Plaza Café was pretty good, and there was a wide selection that catered to vegetarians as well as vegans (not too much for celiacs, but salad options were available).  Thus, I’ll give Plaza Café three and a half cheese sandwiches for being very vegetarian friendly and sufficiently edible for a location where I don’t actually want to get food, but might need it.

Plaza Café at the LACMA
5905 Wilshire Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90036 
(323) 857-6000

People always ask me, “Hey Cheese Sandwich Guy!  What’s you’re favorite veggie burger?”  That’s actually a difficult question, as different veggie burgers are good for different reasons.  For instance, you may like a veggie burger because it has a texture similar to a real burger.  I don’t personally, as I think those “fake” burgers taste like eating a rubber tire.  My personal favorite veggie burger is really a burger that uses portobello mushroom instead of a burger.  Simple, “meaty”, and works really well if you get a fancy burger with cheese and other fixins.  For those of you who like the vegetable patty style burger, there are different styles and ingredients which are good for different reasons. Probably my favorite vegetable patty would have to be from the Druid (though they have nothing else vegetarian on the menu there).  A strong second would have to be Four Burgers in Central Square.

Four Burgers has a really ingenious concept, serve four really delicious variants of burger, that are very high end and charge exorbitant amounts of money for it!  A typical burger costs about 7 dollars, and with fries and a shake you pay around $16 for a meal!  And it is designed to look like a nicer McDonalds.  The premise of Four Burgers is that there are four burgers: a regular burger, turkey burger, salmon burger, and veggie burger (which is vegan).

The problem with this format is while it is simple, you can’t really play around with toppings and ingredients, and the servers scowl at you if you try to make things too complicated.  But if you want a simple burger and fries and no fuss, this is the place for you!  For my liking the black bean burger is pretty tasty, and is served with salsa and guacamole (i.e. western style), but the combination of flavors is pretty simplistic, and I feel like something is missing flavor-wise.  The food is all quite mushy and salty and buttery, but it would be nice to have a contrasting flavor/texture, though I still am not sure what exactly that would be.  Perhaps tortilla strips mixed in with the salsa, and/or fried jalapeno slices?  I think this would provide a little bit of heat to make the burger more flavorful (the salsa, guacamole and burger are all a little bland, and adding Cholula just makes it taste like Cholula).  The sweet potato and regular fries are pretty average and nothing to write home about.  And I can’t get ranch dressing to dip my fries into, which is not a good thing for a quasi-obese Southerner like me.

Overall, Four Burgers is a simple tasty, yet expensive restaurant.  I have eaten here a few times and have enjoyed it every time (though my wallet did not).  Considering the concept is so simple, you’d think there would be a way to make the food cheaper.  But I think that’s the price you pay for quality food, and local ingredients.  My one critique is that I think I could make a tastier veggie burger by modifying the toppings, and Four Burgers doesn’t let me have it my way (the one thing Burger King got right).  So, I’ll give Four Burgers four cheese sandwiches, as that feels appropriate.

*This has been asked once to me, but I prefer hyperbole. And they did call me “Cheese Sandwich Guy” despite knowing my real name.

Four Burgers
704 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02139 
(617) 441-5444

Boston, unlike New York, does not have a wealth of indigenous burger chains that serve mass-produced veggie burgers (see NYC Veggie Burger META Review).  There are a few, such as B. Good and Uburger, but that is it.  This is sad for perhaps the 3% of my readers that are really keen on getting a veggie burger fast (chime up if you think there are more people that want good fast veggie burgers not served as pub-grub).  Uburger is almost universally praised as being one of the best local burger chains in Boston.  A new location just opened on the Common, near where I work, so I went with Kenny to check it out.

While Uburger claims that it was founded on the premise that “high-quality and fresh ingredients make a huge difference”, they obviously do not apply that ethos to their veggie burgers.  It is obviously a frozen patty, very much akin to a Gardenburger patty (though it tastes marginally better than your typical Gardenburger).  What’s more, you have to pay 35 cents more to get a veggie burger!  Their “About Us” section states that they only have freezers to keep their ice cream cold.  Which makes me confused on multiple reasons - Do they not freeze their veggie burgers?  Are the patties just kept at room temperature and then fried?  That can’t be sanitary.  Unless they’re lying… Which would explain why you have to pay 35 cents extra for a veggie burger, it’s freezer overhead costs.

The fries are very tasty, as they taste like freshly made McDonald’s fries.  They are very simple and delicious.  No complaints on this front.

Despite it looking like a vat of sludge, the mint oreo shake was phenomenal.  It is just starting to get a little warm, and I am already looking forward to a summer of frappes (shakes for you in normal non-New England parts of the country).  And this frappe served as a good prelude for the summer to come.

I can understand how the meat eaters can enjoy Uburger, almost everything I had was pretty good and cheap.  I got a regular cheese veggie burger, fries, and a shake all for ~$11.  A pretty good deal for anywhere that is not overtly destroying the world (McDonalds, Burger King).  However, their veggie burger is of appalling quality considering they take such pride in their meat patties.  If they can make fresh meat patties daily, just make a small percentage of veggie patties.  I actually would not even complain if it was frozen (well, maybe a little), but it would still be 100 times better than the Gardenburger patty.  I don’t even understand why every crappy restaurant uses Gardenburger patties.  Is there some sort of sinister conspiracy that Gardenburger is behind trying to make meals disgusting for vegetarians everywhere?  Also, Gardenburger patties are not vegan.  At the very least, this should be considered if you actually care about customers.  Because of this meat-eating snobbery against making a decent veggie burger, I have to give Uburger two cheese sandwiches.  As the place is actually pretty decent, but they don’t nail the one dish that most vegetarians/vegans would eat if they came here.

Uburger
140 Tremont Street
Boston, MA 02108

One of the great quirks of living in a city is watching the turnover of restaurants in certain spaces.  Since I started working in Boston, I’ve seen a lot of places come and go near Downtown Crossing, and one of my old favorite locations was the Know Fat! establishment near the Eddie Bauer.  I loved Know Fat! because it pretended to be a healthy dining establishment, yet all of the food was still really fatty.  Also, if you want to be a healthy restaurant, you should probably not associate the word fat into your name.  Fortunately, the new Ufood Grill (technically it’s been here a year) has taken its place and has dropped the fat in the title.

Unlike Know Fat!, Ufood Grill has a veggie burger.  After eating the veggie burger, I’m not sure if this is a good thing or not, as the burger was slightly uncooked (which is disgusting coming from a frozen patty).  Also, it was one of the “fake hamburger” style of veggie burger, rather than being a vegetable patty that I typically prefer.  Part of the reason giving up meat was so easy for me was that I only used to eat crappy processed food from fast food chains.  So, while this veggie burger was pleasantly nostalgic, I could have done without eating such rubbish.

As disgusting as the burger was, the fries were actually pretty tasty.  This was one pleasant continuation from Know Fat, which had delicious fries, that they insisted were low fat, but were in reality something like 500 calories per serving.  Overall, there are far more vegetarian options at Ufood Grill than the previous incarnation, which makes sense for a place that encourages healthy eating.  That was the most vexing aspect of Know Fat! since I could not fathom a restaurant that insisted it was healthy eating, when they had so few vegetarian options.  While their veggie burger is pretty generic and terrible, they do have a lot of other choices that are decent for a fast food joint.  The most fair comparison of Ufood is to other fast food places, and on those criteria, Ufood is pretty good, so I’ll give it three and a half cheese sandwiches.

Ufood Grill
530 Washington Street
Boston, MA 02111-1723 
(617) 451-0043

My cousin was noticing a recent rise in my depression at eating Indian food practially every day, so she decided to take me out to a new restaurant called Marrybrown in the ground floor of the Sree Bhavan hotel. One of the perks of Tambaram developing into a full-fledged city is that I can go out and actually eat non-Indian food. Unfortunately, when going to non-Indian restaurants, you begin to run the risk of falling into the same traps you experience in US restaurants.

By all estimations, Marrybrown appears to be an Indianised version of Kentucky Fried Chicken (there is Kentucky Fried Chicken in India, but Marrybrown seems to be an Indian variant of that, though it is a Malaysian company). The first thing you will notice when entering is the overpowering scent of fried chicken flesh. As a former meat eater, every once in a while, I do catch a smell of something like bacon or barbecue that makes me think whistfully of my days of eating meat. It’s rare that I’m actually disgusted by the smell of meat, but in this instance, I would argue that the smell was so putrid that I contemplated cancelling this excursion altogether.

Nevertheless, the opportunity to eat a veggie burger was so exciting, that I held my nose, ignored the mosquitoes in the dining hall and waited for the food to come. First, a paneer tikka wrap, which was little more than a tortilla wrapping a spicy blend of onions and peppers. The paneer itself was as non-existent as the accountability of Indian government officials to their people (my political statement of the day, sorry).

With the wrap, we ordered potato wedges (for my cousin) and masala bites, which appeared to be deep-fried bits of biryani. That was an interesting concept for me, and it worked on the occasion that there was a potato piece with the biryani. Otherwise, fried rice balls do nothing for me, no matter what people in the North End may insist upon.

Finally, we got the veggie burger, which came with a slice of lettuce, a slice of cheese, and some mayonnaise. Altogether, this was quite a delicious sandwich, as the burger was a spicy vegetable medly, and on its own would have competed quite well with other delicious veggie burgers that I have had. I would be concerned for those who are true vegetarians, as there was mayonnaise on top, making it not pure-veg.

One of the problems with trying to eat more American-style in India is that Indians really ruin the American dining experience. They think “Americans love meat”, so they pump noxious meat fumes throughout the dining area*. I think also Indian meat is quite disgusting. I’ve eaten chicken once in India, and I experienced a bout of cataclysmic diarrhea as a result. So, I’ve avoided meat in India ever since. This might explain why the meat smell is so disgusting anytime you enter one of the few non-veg restaurants in India.

Overall, the food in Marrybrown is pretty good, but it’s one of the types of restaurants that you never want to sit in – like most places in Chinatown. Fortunately, they do deliver, so maybe that would be a better idea. Also, you get tons of mosquitos at night, so it’s easiest just to stay at home and let some poor chump get bit trying to deliver your food. So, I’ll give Marrybrown three cheese sandwiches.

*They probably aren’t pumping it as much as not ventilating properly. This is likely due to their inability to meld frying meat with having air conditioning.