Please note: This article was first published on The Vegan Tourist and last updated February 18, 2012.
Before I travelled to New York City in May 2011, I ordered two guide books from Amazon: The Vegan Guide to New York City and Veg Out: Vegetarian Guide to New York City.
Of the two, The Vegan Guide to New York City is by far the superior guide book for vegans, and I already reviewed it a while ago. I visited many vegetarian restaurants during my ten-day stay in Manhattan, and I found all of them through this book.
Veg Out: Vegetarian Guide to New York City was a disappointment, however, and I didn’t bother to take it along on my trip.
For starters, the second (most recent) edition of this guide book is from 2006, and restaurants shut down all the time, with new ones opening. I feared that it would simply be outdated.
My biggest complaint about this book is that it’s simply not a vegetarian guide. Out of the 172 restaurants reviewed in Manhattan, 112 were not vegetarian restaurants at all but restaurants with “full menus and vegetarian and vegan choices.” (The book also covers Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx.)
As a vegan, I want to support businesses that cater to vegetarians, and I don’t mind going out of my way to find and visit them. I found the book’s title misleading. Almost all restaurants have vegetarian choices these days (some more than others), but many vegans are concerned about cross-contamination with non-vegan foods, and prefer to eat in restaurants that don’t offer meat or seafood (myself included).
So this book isn’t very useful for vegans, and probably not of much interest to carnivores. Maybe that’s the reason why it hasn’t been updated recently, and the latest edition is from 2006.
Buy The Vegan Guide to New York City instead. It’s updated every year.