Padmanadi Vegetarian Restaurant
10626-97 St, 428-8899

Padmanadi, the venerable vendor of vegan delights on 97 Street, marked seven years in business last week. I’d love to be able to tell you about the celebratory all-you-can-eat buffet, but by the time I arrived early Friday evening, the restaurant was not just packed but lined up 50 people deep out onto the sidewalk. Luckily I had dropped by a few days prior with my own sizable group, taken a good tour of the menu, and sampled deeply from Padmanadi’s utterly unique brand of hospitality.

In a town underequipped with meatless dining-out options, there’s little wonder that Padmanadi draws such a loyal following, but rarity alone doesn’t account for their popularity. Padmanadi doesn’t just wait on its patrons; it befriends them as well and draws them into a communal atmosphere of enlightened eating. Gregarious proprietor Kasim Kasim (yes, he’s so nice they named him twice) and family see to it that no one leaves without feeling like they have been vigorously hosted, not to mention well-fed. The dozens upon dozens of photographs of patrons — and two signed headshots of Ernie “the African-American Ghostbuster” Hudson — attest to the delight and gratitude Mr. Kasim feels for the folks who cross his transom. 

On the night of my visit to the usually hopping dining room, which crams all the appurtenances of a family restaurant, Buddhist shrine, and karaoke lounge into one space, I was with a large enough group that it made sense to order the set menu for eight, which entitles you and yours to eight dishes, rice, dessert, and chrysanthemum tea for $20 a head. This is as good a reason as I can think of as any for getting eight people together, vegetarians or no.

The meal started with spring rolls and vegetarian drumsticks. The spring rolls, served with plum sauce, were what you’d expect in the best possible sense, but nothing could really prepare you for the faux-drumsticks — moist parcels of textured soy protein in a thin wonton-wrapper skin bundled onto a small bamboo rod to approximate the experience of a chicken leg. One of the vegetarians at the table took exception to the presentation, but that just gave the person sitting next to me the opportunity to devour his portion — I don’t think it would have fooled anyone into thinking it was chicken, but it was salty and tender and delicious.

In fact, the range of counterfeit meats, including beef, BBQ pork, ham, mutton, and seafood, aren’t really meant to persuade patrons that they are getting their flesh-fix without the attendant suffering to animals. Rather it’s meant to convey the range of flavours and textures that can be conveyed with artfully prepared soy protein. So relax.

From there on in, the food did not seem to stop coming. Next there was a big bowl of hot and sour soup — dark spicy broth sweetened with Indonesian soy sauce and packed with tofu, bamboo, fungus, peas, and carrots — followed by Lo-hon vegetables (broccoli, cauliflower, bok choy, carrots, baby corn, and tofu in mushroom oyster sauce), stir-fried spicy eggplant in a spicy-sweet lacquer, mock chicken with ginger, black fungus and lily flower and, my absolute favourite of the night, veggie chicken curry with melt-in-your-mouth cubes of potato in a creamy coconut sauce that I kept spooning over rice long after the mock meat and taters were gone. The chicken stand-in was chewy and savoury and satisfying, standing up well to the overall spiciness of the dish, which was definitely the hottest of the night.

There was still food on the table when we all admitted we couldn’t eat much more, at which point the ageless, energetic Mr. Kasim, who had been distributing his considerable personal charm about the room, inveighed on us to join him in a little karaoke. I managed to avoid taking the microphone by absorbing my attention in the delicious bowl of coconut-scented rice pudding with vegan mango ice cream and a cinnamon-dusted strawberry that fulfilled the dessert component of our set menu. My apologies to the few late diners who thought they were in for a quietly dignified vegan meal, though Kasim’s heartfelt version of the oft-covered schmaltz-classic “Let It Be Me” definitely raised the tone of the night.

Before we headed out, Kasim told us with pride that Moby and members of Propagandhi had been recent patrons, then showed us the blueprints for his new restaurant slated to open on 101 Street and 107 Avenue in February 2010. The night’s repast and abundance of personal warmth left little doubt he’ll have no problem packing them in there too.