Eat up their greens
(Filed: 29/05/2004)

Wine.telegraph.co.uk

Of all the places in the world where vegetables might flourish, Hammersmith, in west London, must be one of the most unlikely. A peaceful vegetarian riding a bicycle would surely be mown down on the roundabout, or mugged under the flyover, before so much as a broccoli floret passed his lips. Yet, just a few sun salutations from the London homes of some of the world's biggest corporations (Coca-Cola, Disney and l'Oréal, to name a few), lies The Gate restaurant, a paradise for hungry tree-huggers and their ilk.

For those of us for whom eating greens is more of a duty than a pleasure, the story of The Gate will strike an unexpected chord. Adrian Daniel, the restaurant's self-taught Indo-Iraqi chef, didn't care for vegetables either until, in a Damascene moment in his early twenties, he tasted a cauliflower dish cooked in a tandoor in India. "It was a revelation,'' he says. "I realised it wasn't vegetables I disliked, but the way they were cooked - their wetness. I realised that water destroys everything.''

With 14 years' experience of cooking veggie food (The Gate opened in 1990), Adrian, 39, and his brother, Michael, 36, have written a cookery book in which many of the recipes behind the restaurant's classic dishes are unveiled for the first time. Even if you're a meat-lover, The Gate's sophisticated Middle-East-meets-Mediterranean cooking doesn't leave you feeling short-changed. Recipes for baba ghanoush and tabbouleh feature alongside saffron tortellini, herby soufléed omelettes and almond tarts spiced with cardamom. All the bleakly virtuous clichés of vegetarian cooking are absent from the glossy 256-page book.

Vegetarianism, in case you hadn't noticed, is now extremely chic. Sir Paul McCartney and his wife Heather are regulars at The Gate and over the years the restaurant has seen Glenn Close, Eric Clapton and Woody Harrelson pass through its doors. The sophisticated menu - a finely tuned balance of flavours, cooking styles and even continents - reflects Adrian's belief that "people eat with their eyes as much as their palates". Although the restaurant, which resembles a 1960s student union, is far from ritzy, the cooking has undeniable brio.

Chefs often treat vegetables like pariahs, ignoring them completely, but in The Gate Vegetarian Cookbook, where neither fish nor fowl can be relied on to take centre stage, the reverse is true. Artichokes are roasted in lime leaves and filled with avocado and goat's cheese; potato cakes are dressed with dates and tamarind. The voguish (butternut squash, wild garlic, sweet potatoes), the neglected (beetroot, celeriac, turnips), the outmoded (sun-dried tomatoes) and even the naff (baby sweetcorn, asparagus tips) are grilled, slow-roasted, sautéed and stir-fried. In an excellent chapter on store-cupboard essentials, keen cooks are advised to stock up on tahini, tamarind and preserved lemons.

There is no mission to convert, although Adrian, the more soulful of the two brothers, has been a vegetarian since he was 17. Michael, who runs the business side of things, eats meat occasionally. "If I have an evangelical obsession, it's with good food,'' he says. Although he practises yoga and has been vegetarian for long periods of his life, he admits he cannot resist his mother's chicken stew.

In an age in which so many of us are reducing our meat consumption, the brothers hope that the book will appeal to meat lovers as well as committed vegetarians. Some of the dishes are quite laborious, but the unusual combinations -artichokes with truffle oil, asparagus with thyme, sweet potato with pomegranate - are designed to inspire, rather than merely bring comfort to the nation's vegans and vegetarians. ``When we first opened, we had a lot of the sandals brigade,'' says Michael. "But we like to think we're synonymous with good food, rather than just vegetarianism.''

• 'The Gate Vegetarian Cookbook' by Adrian and Michael Daniel (Mitchell Beazley) is available for £23 plus £2.25 p & p from Telegraph Books Direct (0870 155 7222).

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