Where’s The Beet?

It’s weird how hard you have to try to not eat a lot of meat. Your French toast comes with a side of bacon; chicken is dumped on your salad; protein is the first dinner item you consider when shopping and the only one when pairing wine. Raising, slaughtering and butchering animals might be a lot of work, but eating meat is supereasy these days. According to one academic’s crunching of U.S. Department of Agriculture data, the average American over a lifetime consumes 21,000 animals — many, I presume, kind of by accident.

(Watch TIME’s video “A Chef Vegges Out.”)

Some chefs are trying to lower that number. Not by making their restaurants vegetarian but by reducing the role of protein to what it had been before it got so damn cheap. Houses and cars cost 14 times what they did 50 years ago, while the price of chicken hasn’t even doubled, because factory farming has become so efficient. That helps explain why we eat 150 times as many chickens a year as we did 80 years ago. “I grew up on a farm in Austria. We had meat once a week. A Wiener schnitzel was a special-occasion thing,” says Spago’s Wolfgang Puck. Puck is not the only big-name chef alarmed by our current state of carnivorous gluttony. “I don’t understand how it’s cheaper to buy a whole steak at the Price Club than spinach,” says José Andrés, the acclaimed Spanish chef who has restaurants in Los Angeles and Washington. “How did that happen?”

The reason Andrés, Puck and others are moving animal protein away from the center of the plate isn’t just that doing so benefits our health and the environment (meat production creates a lot of greenhouse gases); it’s also that a big hunk of meat can be boring to cook — and boring to eat. “I’ve always been the kind of guy who, after four bites of a big steak, I’m tired of it,” says Mario Batali, whose new cookbook, Molto Gusto, argues for the use of meat almost as a spice, cut into small pieces in pastas, pizzas, rice dishes and vegetables.

All 15 of Batali’s restaurants serve extra vegetarian options on Meatless Monday, an offshoot of the partial-vegetarianism movement that is spreading across the country (see story on page 53); he’s also getting ready to open a small vegetarian restaurant in New York City.

While Mediterranean (as well as Asian) cooking is inherently less meat-focused than American cuisine, Batali says he’s had no trouble getting his customers to change their thinking. “When ramps come in, more than half of our customers order pasta with ramps. We’ve been able to train them to appreciate it,” he says of the wild leek that in recent years has become an early-spring favorite among foodies. “If we can make customers appreciate the fleeting nature of vegetables, they may jump on vegetables more quickly.”

In addition to talking up their nonmeat ingredients, some chefs are using small-plate dining, with more courses, to avoid filling one big plate with meat. “Our protein portions are smaller than those of restaurants like this 10 years ago,” says Quinn Hatfield of Hatfield’s in Los Angeles. “The hard part of that is when someone says, ‘I’ll have the halibut,’ and it’s not a 6-oz. portion of halibut — it’s a 4-oz. piece. That can be hard.”

But it’s starting to get easier. At Andrés’ Los Angeles tapas restaurant, the Bazaar, two of his five best-selling items are spinach and asparagus. “I love meat, but it’s boring,” says Andrés, who is no vegetarian. This is a guy who likes to eat baby pigs and tiny lambs. “Our brain, our body craves fat. We cannot help it. That’s why a kid will eat a hot dog quicker than a piece of broccoli.”

Andrés, however, wants to help American palates grow up. “Pure flavor to pure flavor, I’m sorry, but brussels sprouts, white asparagus, a clementine, a pineapple, a good peach, the flavor in the mouth, the smell — it’s unbeatable,” he says. “It’s a rainbow of possibilities. It’s more interesting than any meat.” And restaurant patrons need to grasp the economics of making organic, sustainable agriculture the norm. “Diners are going to have to understand they are going to have to pay more for less and that meat is going to be a complement for everything else,” he says.

People may be willing to eat more vegetables, but asking them to pay a lot for a meatless entrée is still not a great business plan, even though the overhead and prep time are often the same as with meat. “Frank Bruni tried to tell me that my $15 vegetarian cauliflower was too expensive because it was just cauliflower,” says Bill Telepan, referring to the former New York Times restaurant critic. Telepan is a near vegetarian who creates all the dishes at his eponymous New York City restaurant around the vegetable instead of the protein. He has done well with his harvest menus, in which he reverses standard menu storytelling and gives the vegetable top billing in the description, followed by the meat. But he offers these menus only once a month.

Contrast that with the eternal steakhouse. “A steakhouse rarely goes out of business,” says Puck. “Most don’t even have a chef with a lot of talent.” But Puck’s steakhouses, Cut (in Los Angeles and Las Vegas), have gotten amazing reviews for their appetizers, some of which are meat-free, and that has helped him sell a lot of 8-oz. steaks instead of the more typical 14-oz. portion. “I want people to get the flavor and taste of the meat but not sit with half the cow in front of them,” he says. When Puck eats at Cut with his wife, they split the 8-oz. steak. Likewise, Kerry Simon, who eats meat about once a week, is offering smaller meat portions — and vegetarian items — at his newly opened steak restaurants in Atlantic City, N.J., and Las Vegas. “I think there’s a lot of mixed diners out there,” he says.

That’s what John Fraser of New York City’s Dovetail has been trying to figure out. In March he started changing his menu on Mondays to a $42 four-course prix fixe that lets diners choose whether to go vegetarian or vegetable-focused (for instance, long beans, jalapeño and sea-urchin butter). He’s treating Mondays as a test to see if he can afford to open a veggie-centric restaurant, which reflects a style similar to how he eats. “In support of the carrots, a little bit of lamb — it makes it more meaningful and rich,” he says.

Getting people to trade their hamburger for carrots with a bit of lamb requires getting them to think more about the meat they’re eating. “You can relate it to sex,” Fraser says. “If you have it every day and it’s crazy and beautiful, it isn’t meaningful. But if you have it every once in a while, it becomes meaningful.” Fraser, it’s worth noting, is a far better chef than convincing-analogy maker.