Review Mon Apr 28 2008

Cheese-Free Cheese Fries (and more!)

Let us be very clear: I am not a vegetarian. I am a bacon-loving, steak-charring, carnivorous foie gras advocate if ever there was one. I'm hard pressed to cook anything that doesn't get an extra protein kick from an animal. And it should go without saying I'm about as far from a vegan as a puma. But I've been eating at the new Veggie Bite location on Milwaukee kind of a lot lately. And I'm kind of into it.

I'd like to think I came into Veggie Bite biased, but evenly on both the pros and cons. I'd read some seriously mixed reviews, but also heard some excited interest from among my vegetarian friends. Yes, it's a fully vegan restaurant bringing some pretty restricted dining options down to the average hungry hoi polloi, but at the end of the day, it's just fast food, so how good can it really be? With these qualifiers in the back of my mind, I've now tried Veggie Bite's cheeseburger, cheese fries, nachos, and chicken nuggets, and had tastes of their wrap and milkshakes. (Of course, "cheese," "burger," "chicken," and "milk" are all theoretical terms in this context). For fast food, it's not bad in the slightest. The nachos and cheese fries come slathered in something called Golden Sauce, which does a fair job resembling the barely-dairy cheese sauce at a regular fast food stop. The fake chicken in the nuggets was just as good, if not better, than what I've been avoiding eating at McDonald's for years -- and no troubling, unexpected shards of rock-hard unidentified chicken substance (which are why I'd stopped eating regular nuggets in the first place). I was really impressed with the burger as well, which had the flavor and texture of a single patty nailed -- Golden Sauce replaced the requisite slice of melted American, but it worked. The shakes may be on the sweet side, but they avoid that melted ice cream taste that I always associate with Tofutti.

Granted, there are problems with the service (it's slooooowwwww, my goodness, and on my second visit, my chix-free nuggets seemed to break the deep-fryer and force the folks in line behind me to rethink their dinner options), and the Milwaukee outpost looks like it could be a kindergarten classroom in its free time. But for a fairly cheap snack or dinner on the fly, I'll certainly consider Veggie Bite among my options from now on. Way to go, vegetarians -- you may be onto something.

- Andie Thomalla