Meet the Meaty Veggies

A host of chefs are creating vegetable dishes that are anything but dainty.

Cauliflower steak with quinoa

It's been a decade of intense meat worship, but now chefs are procuring, preparing and serving vegetables with the same love and attention they previously reserved for Ossabaw pork or grass-fed marrow bones.

But the turn to the garden patch is leaving chefs with a conundrum: How do they get an all-veg meal to taste, well, meaty? "How do you make the 'sink your teeth into it' part of it, that makes you think, okay, I had dinner now?" says Clark Frasier, whose vegetable tasting menu will premiere at Arrows in Ogunquit, Maine, later this month.

For New York chef Dan Barber, one solution is to simply serve steak