Vegan Fine Dining
Thu, 30 Jul 2026
Food
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I have written in the past about being vegan and some of the
unexpected challenges that lifestyle entailed. What I have not
written about however is the difficulties that arise in trying
to eat out at restaurants or bars. It is a fairly well know
fact that the most difficult aspect of eating vegan (some might
say the only TRULY one) is eating when you are not cooking for
yourself.

Restaurants typically don't have vegan dishes depending on the
country and region you are in, pasties and cakes at cafes are
even worse as you cannot ask them to take the egg out after
baking, supermarket sandwiches and ready-meals are typically not
vegan, and so on. In recent years, this has gotten a lot
better, with most places carrying at least one vegan item and
allowing for rather simple modifications to vegetarian dishes to
make them vegan. However, a lot of these improvement are found
at fast-food places, street food, and lunch-bars, not so much at
high-quality‑, fine-dining- restaurants.

It is for this reason that I want to share the story of a
restaurant I went to recently called `Shakti' in Brescia Italy.
This is a 100% vegan fine-dining restaurant whose food was
absolutely delicious.

More important than the flavour however was the peace of mind.
As a vegan, no matter what country you live in, it is nearly
impossible to just show up at a restaurant and expect to be
taken care of. You need to check the menus ahead of time, ask
for modifications, ingredients, preparation methods and so on.
Therefore it is always lovely to go to a fully-vegan restaurant.
We just showed up and asked for the 5-course menu, no stress, no
questions.

Then there was the fact that the chef actually tried making
interesting vegan dishes. We collectively figured out almost a
decade ago how to make good-tasting vegan hamburgers. It turns
out that fast-food (made tasty mostly with flavour enhancers and
spice) is very easy to make with meat-replacement products. But
making an interesting dish from the ground-up using only vegan
products, that is more difficult. This restaurant managed it
though, and additionally gave me the now-novel experience of not
being able to identify all the ingredients making up the dish, a
feeling I have not had for a very long time.

All of that is to say: If you find yourself in Brescia, and want
a (moderately expensive) delicious night out, check out Shakti.
You should be ready for a long evening however, as there is a
lot of time between courses. For me this added to the
experience, but I can certainly imaging that it would be
too-long for some people (the 5 course menu took us around 3
hours).

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