Give Bessie a Break

For gourmet dinners, of course, we have Sublime in Fort Lauderdale, a restaurant founded by animal-rights activist Nanci Alexander and serving an entirely vegan, and partly organic, menu that's finally living up to its name. The place has always been beautiful, with its water wall and open brick oven and its inventive list of "healthy" cocktails and organic wines, but until last week, I'd never had a good meal there. I couldn't figure out why even a vegan would want to eat seitan or anything made with soy cheese when almost every cuisine on Earth offers better vegetarian dishes as an afterthought, using real food: ratatouille, for instance, or vegetable fried rice or samosas or couscous. Sublime has had its share of woes over the years — unworkable partnerships and hurricanes have closed it temporarily from time to time. But after my last dinner there, I wanted to get up and dance on the table — I was frankly ecstatic. I'd rate what we ate as one of my top five meals this year, and that includes haute, chichi edibles at some of the best restaurants in the country.

Sublime's cauliflower "frito misto" is a good example of what they can get up to ($12), an appetizer that runs right across the full spectrum of flavors, sensations, and textures: tempura battered cauliflower florets tossed in a sweet, hot chili sauce made with chili flakes, garlic, paprika, sugar, and vinegar boiled down to the consistency of maple syrup, garnished with roasted sesame seeds and tiny curls of green onion. The dish looks beautiful, it tastes divine, and it fills all your nooks and crannies with pleasure. A gorgeous sublime roll ($10, from the "sushi" menu) comes wrapped in grasshopper-green soy paper with avocado, scallions, and cucumber inside and pools of lemon "aioli" (a soy mayonnaise) for dipping. Carrot ginger soup ($7) combines sweet, bracing flavors that shake your taste buds awake. Everything tastes as fresh and bright as if chef Seth Kirschbaum had just plucked them from the garden. And these are just the starters.

You can order a classic margarita pizza ($12) from the wood-burning oven with either a white or whole-wheat crust (I recommend the white) or one with pesto, soy cheese, and tomatoes ($14) or one topped with fake "caviar" (made from sea vegetable), chives, and crème fraîche ($40); our pesto pizza was marvelous and could totally go crust-to-crust with the best brick-oven pizzas in South Florida. A braised spinach, wood-fired artichoke, and roasted shallot "quiche" ($16) lacking either eggs or cream was the biggest knockout — how the hell do you make a pie this creamy and rich without animal fat? With tofu? You've got to be kidding! It came with the most delicate green beans tossed in olive oil, garnished with long chives and leaves of fresh parsley, and a glistening pile of roasted red-bliss potatoes.

The presentation of everything was exquisite. Chocolate nirvana cake ($11), made with both cocoa and that bane of '70s hippiedom, carob, ran circles around most chocolate desserts — except for the soy whipped cream — which was the only soy-based pseudo-food that didn't win me over. It still tasted like soy milk.

Broward and Palm Beach are still challenged: We don't have anywhere near the range of vegetarian, organic, raw, and vegan restaurants we need or the number of greenmarkets, CSAs, and whole food outlets. It's frankly still a chore to try to eat healthy at even our best restaurants, but some are starting to offer organic, local, and seasonal produce. South Florida chefs and restaurateurs ought to get with the program and take it seriously: They have the opportunity to be leaders here. I'm with Bittman: We need to jump on this bandwagon and hang on for our lives if our kids are going to live in a world we'd even faintly recognize — if, for that matter, they live to see it at all.