Victory is sweet for once-lowly vegetables.

How veggies became the sexiest thing on your plate

It looks like a butcher shop, and it feels like a butcher shop, albeit slicker and more colourful with pops of vibrant orange. But it’s vegetables, not meat, on the chopping block.

Shoppers will find carrot “lox” and ground beet burger patties, naturally bloody looking; they totally mimic the appearance and texture of their meat counterparts, grill marks included — completed by parsnip, carrot, brown rice, pistachio and tarragon. “A lot of people walk in and are quite confused when they see there’s no meat,” says Jess Abramson, part of the daughter-father team behind Toronto’s Yam Chops, a new plant-based butcher shop.

As for that carrot “lox,” carrots are mandolined lengthwise, then double marinated, first with a dry marinade, then a wet one, before being baked to mimic some of the texture and flavour notes of lox, minus, of course, the fishiness.

Yam Chops, as well a slew of new cookbooks and restaurants, is here to declare that vegetables are now the star of the plate, every bit as luscious and satisfying as the meat they’re sidelining.

For vegetarians, the options are stunning. But for omnivores too, eating is getting a lot more colourful and inventive. Yotam Ottolenghi’s now groundbreaking cookbook Plenty, all Middle-Eastern flavours with a western sensibility, sent eggplant, tahini and pomegranate stocks soaring as he made veggies sexy again.

Likewise, chef Steven Satterfield — dubbed the “Vegetable Shaman” by Sam Sifton, the food editor at the New York Times — uses contemporary methods in his whole vegetable cooking at his Atlanta restaurant Miller Union. His new cookbook, Root to Leaf, is a nod to the nose-to-tail movement popularized by chefs Fergus Henderson and April Bloomfield — and embraced on every bistro corner.

Bloomfield herself veers into the veggie lane with her latest cookbook, A Girl and Her Greens. Coming from the woman who brought New York City the Spotted Pig and readers her previous bestseller, A Girl and Her Pig, this may seem like a 180-degree turn. But Bloomfield brings the same fierce simplicity and technique to bear. She often treats a vegetable as if it were meat, braising a whole head of cauliflower in a rich tomato sauce, or piling them on to her massive salad sandwiches — twice as big and three times more delicious than a typical club house.

That said, she’s not the only chef dishing the dirt on vegetable cookery. In his latest cookbook, The Broad Fork, Georgia chef Acheson is all about making the most of one’s farmers' market bounty, CSA box or the grocery produce aisle.

In the book, Acheson spans the four seasons of fresh produce through 50 ingredients, from kohlrabi to carrots, demystifying or reintroducing them to home cooks via 200 recipes, not necessarily vegetarian. Think: autumn’s snapper ceviche with apple and lime, and pan-roasted pork tenderloin with sorghum and roasted apples.

Chef Acheson is a Canadian born southern chef, with a handful of restaurants in Georgia. Now, y’all, when I think of southern food, my thoughts don’t usually run to a healthy, vegetable-focused meal, yet at Acheson’s The Florence, his seasonal Italian restaurant in Savannah, I enjoyed just that during the last days of winter.

We started with house-bottled wine coolers: Carbonated Pinot Grigio hit with Aperol, cardamom and pear — delightful, then moved on to charred bruschetta with roly-poly springtime peas sitting on ricotta. Up next was a root vegetable salad composed on a piece of slate that was all colour, freshness and texture, with some raw veggies, some cooked paired with whipped chevre and a fine dusting of ground coffee.

Meanwhile, at Amanda Cohen’s Dirt Candy restaurant in New York’s Lower East Side, a recent dinner included super creative vegetal riffs, such as cauliflower waffles, pulled, pickled and jerked carrots, Korean fried broccoli — think trashy sweet and sour chicken balls, but not trashy and not chicken — and eggplant tiramisu.

As Chef Acheson explains, “I think the creativity has changed and as chefs we’ve pushed ourselves more in the past 20 years than we’ve seen in a long time. I think the vegetable-centric restaurants are interesting, but not many people can pull off what Amanda does at Dirt Candy.”

He says that vegetable-centric, as opposed to vegetarian restaurants, are definitely becoming more prevalent. That said; Acheson probably hasn’t visited Vancouver lately, where, likely owing to the wealth of yoga-loving, seawall-jogging vegetarians in the city, there’s a new wave of upmarket meatless restaurants. To wit: The Acorn boasts stunning apps like pickled beech mushrooms with almond porcini crisps and a cashew-herb mousse, while plant-based Graze dishes out corn and red pepper raw tostadas topped with vegetable “ceviches,” and a cheese board featuring “a selection of our finest nut-based cultured cheeses of the moment.” Meanwhile, the Parker has the go-bigor-go-home option of a chef ’s choice, five-course tasting menu — gluten-free and vegan — for the table.

“I just don’t think you need the shrimp appetizer anymore,” explains Acheson, “now a charred cabbage appetizer could be much more interesting.”

Back at Yam Chops, Abramson says, “We’ve moved beyond TVP, seitan and tofu as bases, and now we use a combination of pea, wheat and soy protein, that creates a texture that is so convincingly like a meat mouth feel and tear, you can’t believe it.”

I try a bite of their homemade Szechuan “beef.” I can’t believe it. You would never eat it and ask, “Where’s the beef ?” Of course, many if not most vegetarians aren’t looking to replicate meat, but this plant-based butcher shop isn’t wholly for them. “Over half of our customers are still eating meat,” she says, “but they’ve gotten the message that they should reduce their meat consumption.”

There’s also the heath aspect to it too, as we’re more aware of what’s going on with our bodies — and the earth — than ever before. “If you tried to sell a platter of wheat berries in 1999 it wouldn’t have gone over so well,” Acheson says. “Yet, here we are.”