(Related: 12 Non-Vegetarian Restaurants Serving Delicious Plant-Based Dishes)

Almost immediately, I began missing cheese. Cheese in every form—pecorino, feta and paneer. Peranakan food became impossible—everything seemed to have shrimp, whilst even the most basic chap-chye tends to be flavoured with pork stock. Home cooking was a chore as most of those early meals comprised dull tasteless salads. I’d yet to discover the tricks of creating plant-based umami flavours with sun-dried tomatoes, miso paste, nutritional yeast and dried mushrooms. But once I did, suddenly, the blah bean stews sang, as did noodle salads, which I now hit with toasted nuts and good organic soy.
 
In Mark Bittman’s How To Cook Everything Vegetarian and Yotam Ottolenghi’s Simple, I discovered entirely new recipes and new standbys. And slowly, one meal at a time, my taste-buds adjusted.

Flavour Alternatives

Eventually, even eating out no longer presented challenges. These days, I’m the plant-based equivalent of that kid in The Sixth Sense: I see vegetarian dishes everywhere. It seems as if every “normal” restaurant I go to has plant-based options.
 
It helps, too, that a number of bold-faced named chefs in town are vegetarian or, at least, they know a marketable demographic when they see one—so right off the bat, I have a kitchen sympathetic to the cause.
 
At Saint Pierre, Emmanuel Stroobant, a long-time vegetarian, complements his seasonal game with an entirely separate and utterly delicious 10-course non-meat menu. A recent triumph was a Hass avocado served simply with basil, Amera tomato and slivers of lily bulb.

Samia Ahad, the fabulous Pakistan-born chef behind Coriander Leaf, also has a delightful vegetarian menu that’s just as comprehensive as her meat-based offerings—is anyone else up for pillowy momo dumplings with roasted tomato relish, a spicy Burmese curry spiked with tofu and green onions, or a picture-perfect salad of watermelon, mint, and Turkish white cheese?
 
At The Botanic, I’ve fallen in love with the kale salad studded with raisins and capers, and the crisp nuggets of gnocchi sprinkled with fennel pollen. I practically inhale the crazy good golden slabs of corn fritters every time I’m at Greyhound Café. I also remain utterly devoted to the entire vegan menu at Real Food, and every single fried fritter and flaky curry puff at Shou Yi at Ion’s Opera Food Court.

(Related: 5 Plant-Based Meat Alternatives And Where To Find Them In Singapore)

And one day, during a lunch at my faithfully good Japanese haunt, Sun With Moon, the waiter noticed me distractedly flicking the menu pages.
 
“It’s all fish and meat!” I told him, conscious of a plaintive note in my voice.
 
He brightened up immediately. “Oh, you’re vegetarian, issit? Wait, I come back with our vegetarian menu!”

And then there are the Impossible offerings at Adrift by David Myers, Bread Street Kitchen by Gordon Ramsay, and Cut By Wolfgang Puck where you’re served everything from sausage rolls and massive sliders to a Beef Wellington—the burger, especially, appropriately juicy and dripping with beet juice masquerading as blood. It tastes just like meat, but really, it’s a clever mix of plant-based and hi-tech proteins cooked up, I like to imagine, by some mad vegetarian Igor in a kitchen lab somewhere.
 
The point is, from scratching around for something nice to eat, not much has changed since I turned vegetarian. My friends still speak to me, and there’s always something on the menu for me—even if it means ordering the sautéed spinach and button mushrooms at Morton’s The Steakhouse as a main.
 
Could it be, I wonder, that this is the new normal?

(Related: Why Everyone Is Talking About The Mediterranean Diet In 2019)