Hangzhou vegetarian chain The Lakeside Veggies opened their first installment in early 2017, located in an old courtyard adjacent to West Lake. Before they opened in this city in March, The Lakeside Veggies was already a well-established name among Shanghai vegetarian gourmets. But can it still woo them without the lake view or the courtyard?

*** Their Shanghai branch is on the 2nd floor of a new shopping mall in Xuhui. Despite the lack of foot traffic in this area, they seem to be doing quite well. Thanks to the 68rmb all-you-can-eat buffet, which runs from 11am to 4pm every weekday. Lakeside makes Buddhist cuisine -- vegan food without the "the five pungent spices". Other than that, it's a typical midrange, modern-style Chinese restaurant. Patrons are the middle-class, more mature kind. You often hear Hong Kong and Taiwanese accents here and there. The decor has a slight zen undertone, too, with lotus decorations and fishermen ink paintings hung on the walls. Waitresses place the seats slowly and quietly with their white gloves on. Every dish is brought out with a glass lid -- even for dim sum that's already in a bamboo steamer. The most impressive thing, perhaps, is that all the staff here are required to read the Heart Sutra for ten minutes before they go to work. Needless to say, they're all nice and friendly. One of the perks of dinning in a vegetarian restaurant -- the staff tends to be knowledgeable about what's in your food. Lakeside's buffet alone includes 35 items: dim sums, small dishes, "signature boiled veggies", starchy mains, and desserts. Even more on the à la carte menu, where more photogenic dishes can be found. The sweet and sour lotus root is popular for a reason. It's like a crunchy gu lao rou sandwich, crispy outside, with a thin layer of minced shiitake in the middle. All the tofu dishes here are freshly made in the morning and use black beans as the main ingredient. You will also see vegetables like "high mountain pea shoots" (a bigger pea shoot variety), baby lotus root, and yuer (you probably know it as gloeostereum incarnatum in Latin, a type of fungi that commonly grow on elm trees), which are hard to come by at local wetmarkets. Although Lakeside isn't too keen on making 'mock meat', as many Buddhist places refuse to, they do have a few dishes that resemble what we normally consider meaty food: crispy "fillet" (minced tofu skin and mushrooms wrapped inside fried breadcrumbs), shengjian, and steamed dumplings that mostly use mushrooms as fillings). Their fuqi supian (pictured above) is exceptionally well done, and unsurprisingly, also made of mushrooms. The savory and slightly mouth-numbing spices, the chewy and elastic textures... it has everything that made fuqi feipian (aka the "husband and wife lung pieces") an iconic Sichuan dish. The Lakeside Veggies is an inexpensive place to savor some really decent Chinese cuisine -- only if you stick to the lunch buffet. The menu has a couple of dishes that don't justify their higher prices, and you will easily spend 100 - 150rmb per head on à la carte for a not very substantial meal. But other than this and their weird choice for background music, it's a place that will make you want to go back. *** The Lakeside Veggie is located on the 2nd floor of Sunny Walk, the lunch buffet runs every week day from 11am to 4pm, 68 per person. During weekend, reservation is recommended.