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?)
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.