Beijing is not exactly bursting with vegan and vegetarian restaurants, but you can still find a fair few decent options scattered throughout the city, especially if you know where to look. Enter: Veg Restaurant Guide.
Created by 素食雷达 (sùshí léidá), Veg Restaurant Guide is a Beijing-based platform that promotes vegetarianism by helping users easily locate vegan and vegetarian dining options in the city via a user-friendly interactive map. If you’re traveling, the app also covers over 200 other Chinese cities, making it a godsend for tourists and option-strapped vegetarians.
You can access the guide either via their website, or their handy WeChat mini-program, which you can find by searching 素食餐厅指南 (sùshí cāntīng zhǐnán). The app will automatically appear in either English or Chinese depending on your WeChat language settings but you can also change language in the app’s settings menu. From there, allow the program to access your location information and it will show you all of the plant-based restaurants in your neighborhood.
The map view makes finding vegan and vegetarian restaurants in your area very easy
The featured restaurants appear as pins on the map; click through to access detailed address, how to get there by public transport, contact information, and a tag for whether it is vegetarian or vegan. Each venue is also color-coded depending on price-per-head: blue represents under RMB 100, orange is RMB 100-299, and pink is the most expensive at RMB 300 and up.
Many of the functions of the app are accessible without needing to create an account: you can access information about all the restaurants, share them with friends, submit a new restaurant you’ve found via ‘Add a Restaurant,’ and report errors (such as if a restaurant is now closed). Create an account, and you can save favorite restaurants via the ‘collect’ button, and leave reviews and tips for other users. There is also a sign-in option for Restaurant owners, which presumably allows them to update and edit information about their own venues.
Another fun feature is that if you press the icon of the two figures in the bottom left corner, you can access a ‘dine together’ function. Once enabled, this will show the location of other users in the vicinity, making for a handy way to find dining pals when you’re out and about or some kind of vegan Tinder, depending on what you’re looking for.
Click on a restaurant pin for detailed address and contact information, as well as pictures and reviews by other users
The Veg Restaurant Guide launched over a year ago but there are still some bugs that we’d like to see ironed out. For example, the search function doesn’t work terribly well, failing to list any restaurant options when we typed in ‘Dongcheng Lama Temple’ area, despite there being numerous options pinned on the map view. Secondly, as we all know, Beijing is in constant flux, with restaurants and venues opening and shutting in the blink of an eye, so it’s best to be a bit skeptical about the accuracy of the information and we suggest you call the number listed to check that the restaurant is indeed open before you make the trek.
Despite these kinks, we’re delighted to see this program on the market, a promising indication that more and more individuals and businesses are welcoming the ways of vegetarianism. As well as increased awareness regarding the physical and environmental benefits that a meat-free diet can bring, with the help of more apps like the Veg Restaurant Guide, we hope that China will soon become a place where people of all gastronomic persuasions feel at home.
Now you know where to go, read our tips on how to avoid meat and animal products elsewhere in Beijing.
Photos: pixabay, giphy.com, Veg Restaurant Guide
