Vegan in an Omni World: Michael's Oriental

Saturday was Mum's 60th birthday, so to celebrate Dad took us and all her brothers and sisters out to dinner at Michael's Oriental in Eight Mile Plains. Chinese restaurants can either be fantastic for vegans, or a nightmare. Chicken stock and oyster sauce seem to sneak their way in to the most innocent of looking dishes in some places. So I rang in advance to make sure I would be able to eat there. I have to say the staff were very helpful. They already knew what a vegan actually was, which is always a bonus! When we got to the restaurant, I spoke to the woman behind the desk and she made sure the wait staff and the chefs knew all about how my food was to be prepared. The fact that she could list to me all the things they didn't use if there was a vegan dining there was very reassuring.

The parentals and the aunts and uncles all partook of the 'Ultimate Feast', which quite frankly was just a parade of different sorts of dead critters, so I will not even bother to recap any of it here. Even their vegetables had some crab sauce thing on it. For myself and my brother, who is a fledgling vegetarian, we had out own little veggie feast.



For out entree we shared the vegetarian spring rolls. They were OK, as far as vegetarian spring rolls go, though certainly not the best ever. That honour for me still belongs to Jasmine Rice in Wollongong. Although I have had a few close seconds recently. But there weren't those. They were perfectly pleasant, but a little bit gluggy.

For our mains, we shared two dishes. Which was fun because normally I just end up having one dish to myself. So it is nice to have someone to share with for a bit more variety!



This is stir fried vegetables in a chilli plum sauce. The vegetables were cooked so that they were still a bit crunchy, which I love. The sauce was nice, but there was no chilli in it that I could really taste. I guess we should have asked for them to make it a bit hotter!



And this is Fried Tofu, Bok Choy and Mushrooms, which is in a thick soy sauce. This was great. The fried tofu was particularly excellent! And this was all served with rice in the cutest little bamboo buckets. I wish I had a photo of them!

So overall, not a bad vegan dining experience. Pretty darn expensive for some vegetables though, so I really doubt I'd be going there again on a regular basis with so many other yummy cheap options around the area. But nice for special occasions for the meat eaters, and good to know that the vegans and vegetarians are looked after so well.

In other news, there was a wedding reception there as well and they played 'The Glory Of Love' not once, but twice. Frakking awesome! It's my favourite cheesy love song!