Some people wouldn’t even consider a veggie burger on the menu, but an impossible burger? Sure. It’s about _branding_.

The first time I tried impossible meat I was eating dinner with my old boss and he’d asked if I had heard about impossible meat. I’d heard about it but never tried it, so I ordered it and it was honestly better than I expected.

I never would have tried it if it wasn’t for word of mouth marketing because it was on the menu. Restaurants are in the business of selling food. It’s their job to make items on their menu sound appealing. Just like those Michelin star restaurants including ingredients I’ve never heard of, let alone can’t pronounce. I could never find that ingredient at my local store. Maybe I should try it.

Based on your tone it sounds like you’ve never tried “imitation meat” as you describe it but i can see why people are hyping it. I eat plenty of meat but have started buying beyond meat patties at the store every now and then. It’s magnitudes better than your run-of-the-mill black bean veggie burger.

If they made their own veggie burger, I love that. If they bought the best veggie burger on the market, that's also great.

There are plenty of brands involved in restaurants, in meat, in fake meat, in the preparation of the food (Big Green Egg for example). It's rarer to come across brands in vegetables or non-meat/meat-like products, but it happens. Sometimes their bread comes from the best bakery in town and they want you to know that.

Making everything from scratch is a lot of work for a small restaurant. There's nothing wrong with outsourcing it to a specialist.

And they also sell branded drinks, don't they? They don't brew their own cola or beer (well, some do[0]), and they will tell you what brand they've got.

[0] I recently had lunch at https://deproefzaak.nl/en/ which brews their own beer and serves branded veggie burgers.

Pretty off-topic, but a question: after seeing so many mentions on HN, I was pretty interested to give it a try after seeing Beyond Burgers appear in my Dutch grocery store recently. One thing that struck me, though, was that they were twice as expensive as the A brand plant-based burgers we already had, and over three times as expensive as the cheap ones. How expensive are they in the US? (i.e. are they just this expensive because they're from outside the EU?)

Somehow I don't feel the urge to tell someone enjoying a Budweiser™ beer at a bar that their drink "belongs" for sale only at a grocery/convenience store for at-home consumption only.

I buy sandwiches from a place that advertises they use Boar's Head meat. Shrug

Yes. Budweiser is terrible beer.

A better drinks comparison would be choosing from the menu between a 'Jose Cuervo Authentic Margarita' and a margarita mixed fresh by the bartender.

I agree with the OP - in a restaurant I would always order a made-from-scratch dish (the house margarita) than a factory-made burger (the premixed margarita).

That's a very short sighted view. This isn't about vegetarianism. It's about the environmental crisis, and the overfishing crisis, that we're currently experiencing at a global level. I don't care whether you are vegetarian or not, we are all in the target market for solutions to these problems. That's what replacement meat and fish are about.

Source: my wife who is a Registered Dietitian Nutritionist.

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

fuck off.

And this isn’t just fearmongering. For most restaurants it is uneconomical to cook with anything but the cheapest vegetable oils which are guaranteed to oxidate/become carcinogenic at the temperatures required to cook the food they’re serving. So if you eat out often, being informed about a restaurants sourcing and cooking habits is definitely worth knowing about.

Sounds like you need better friends.

I heard somewhere that the fake burger companies sold to restaurants first because the parameters for cooking it well are much narrower than a regular burger (for now). They didn't want to ruin their products' reputation because of mistakes people made cooking the burgers at home, whereas restaurants will probably do a better job.

Things like beer are a bit more understandable - not every restaurant can have a brewery out the back. (although the ones that do are pretty nice)

The only tasty vegetarian food is Indian and Italian anyway.

I'd say the main reasons for being vegetarian include not wanting to contribute to raising animals just to slaughter them, or eating other "living" beings and objecting to the conditions in which they are raised before they are slaughtered.

Paying extra for the Impossible brand name is mainly for those wanting to switch from meat yet still yearning for the texture/taste of meat. A brand like Impossible foods ensuring consistency across restaurants would contribute to people choosing to switch from meat knowing they are getting a product they have had (and enjoyed?) before.

I agree with this and the rest of your comment. You said it better than I did at the top level. There's something about food imitating food that puts me off, as is there with seeing branding on items at restaurants; but, I don't have problem going an entire week without eating meat in the first place. These products have a target audience and a good mission, but they're not for me (well, I'd get them in the grocery store when available because I like having a frozen veggie burger option at home for when I'm too lazy to cook).