Falling for Vegi Wokery’s meatless meat

PHOTO by ROSHEILA ROBLES

It’s not exactly culinary subterfuge, but nothing at Vegi Wokery is quite what it seems. That’s because nearly all of the restaurant’s dishes can be snuck inside a pair of quotation marks—the “chicken” isn’t chicken, the “fish” isn’t even from the sea. But it all makes sense when you get your first look at the food, as the restaurant focuses on the healthier side of Chinese cooking, turning out vegetarian and vegan replicas of dishes made famous by decades of assimilation.

To those unfamiliar with the meat-swapping process, it probably seems simple—a quick substitution of tofu or tempeh for chicken or beef. But Vegi Wokery’s mock meats require plenty of creativity, as the restaurant’s meals are often eaten with their meat-bearing counterparts in mind (a comparison that’s never equal, but also isn’t likely to go away anytime soon). And yet the restaurant really isn’t about matching those meaty recipes—it’s about cooking up alternatives to the weightier dishes of the Chinese canon.

Settled in on the periphery of Los Cerritos Center, Vegi Wokery is part of a little vegetarian drag, sharing strip mall space with Vasantha Bhavan, a South Indian restaurant that’s home to an elusive and excellent Gobi Manchurian. Vegi Wokery looks the part of its location, too, with washed-out mauves and teals straight from the Reagan years.

Like most suburban Chinese restaurants, Vegi Wokery does a good lunch business, shrinking down its usual dishes into more manageable midday plates. Lunch specials get you a single item paired with soup and rice, a decent combination that does well by afternoon appetites. But nothing at Vegi Wokery even comes close to being overly heavy, so it’s well worth the few extra dollars to save your hunger for the dinner menu.

The restaurant has a number of easygoing appetizers (the vegetarian lettuce wraps are one of the best), but you can also get a light start with a plate of shu mai, the venerable dim sum dumplings. The Cantonese-style dumplings, which usually spill out a mince of pork and black mushrooms, are served here with a meatless mix that’s almost too light, leaving the dumplings a little short on flavor. It’s with more direct and meaty interpretations, like the flaky vegi-eel, that Vegi Wokery gets going on good footing.

Faux-meat eats do even better in the entrees. There are dozens of plates to choose from (vegi-pork ribs, vegi-fish in a hot beat sauce) and nearly all succeed as vegan translations of already-familiar dishes. One of the best choices is the spicy ginger vegi-chicken, which rolls out of the kitchen as almost string-like knots of mock meat. The texture of the so-called chicken is about as good as it gets—tender, but not at all spongy. But it’s the flavor that holds up the dish, soaked all the way through by the light bite of the ginger sauce.

Probably the most unique reinterpretation is Vegi Wokery’s vegi-Peking duck. What’s usually a brutally fattening dish (duck skin literally bathed in oil) is completely transformed here, as slices of soy-based mock duck are paired with plum sauce, a pile of broccoli, a strange sprinkling of cilantro and a row of steamed buns in which to stuff the faux-duck. The cilantro doesn’t fit with the dish, but scrape it off and it’s great from there: a faintly sweet meal worthy of whatever excess there is at Vegi Wokery. You can’t compare the dish to its fowl-based origins, but as an alternative it’s excellent.

There isn’t much else on Vegi Wokery’s menu as rich as the vegi-duck, but for your final bites there’s the restaurant’s fried banana. It’s not an unusual or unexpected dessert by any means, but it’s a well-executed one—balls of banana given the lightest fry and topped with powdered sugar and caramel. For a place that doesn’t use eggs or dairy, the fried banana is a surprisingly decadent ending.

Even with an understanding of Vegi Wokery’s meatless philosophy, it’s best to take the restaurant for what it is: an alternative. After all, it can’t and won’t approximate all your prior Chinese food experiences. Instead, grab some “duck” and create some new ones.

VEGI WOKERY 11329 183RD ST | CERRITOS 90703 | 562.809.3928 | VEGIWOKERY.COM | OPEN MON-SAT 11:30AM-2:30PM AND 4:30-9PM | FOOD FOR TWO $20-35

Tags: cerritos, chinese, Food, mock meat, vegan, vegetarian