Calling all cheese lovers! The Melting Pot restaurant has now launched a 4 course vegan option at all of its locations! You get a vegan cheese fondue, 4 salad options with two dressings, a couple different entree selections, and two dessert options. Your whole meal could very easily be made gluten free as well! Spoiler: they’re all the bomb.com. The four course vegan option is $37 per person, which is less expensive than the non-vegan options! You can also go in for just one of any of the four options for between $8-$20 mattering on which one you want. Keep reading to find out the details on your options for when you go!
To Start: The Cheese
The vegan cheese option is a veganized version of the regular beer cheddar style fondue. It has gluten free beer, minced garlic, mustard powder, salt and cracked pepper, and follow your heart vegan cheddar. It is put together and explained right in front of you as you drool watching that vegan cheese melt before your eyes. Your dippers include green apples, pretzel bread, whole wheat bread, sourdough bread, broccoli, cauliflower, and carrots, so all you have to skip is the bread to make it gluten free. This was amazing! Neither me or my newly vegan boyfriend (a.k.a he still remembers exactly what cheese tastes like) could tell the difference between this and the regular version. It melted really well and it easily coated our dippers. It was so good that we finished all the dippers and went back in licking our spoons afterward!
Stage Two: Salads
The four course meal comes with a smallish salad, which I used to always skip when I still ate dairy because I would feel so sick from just part one! But you can ask your server to veganize any of the four salad options, and add oil and vinegar or a raspberry balsamic dressing. Your server can also bring you the garlic and wine seasoning which is usually brought out for the entree, but we enjoyed with our salads! My boyfriend had the veganized house with oil and vinegar and I had the veganized California with raspberry balsamic.
Going for Thirds: The Entrees
For entrees you can either choose one of the preselected meals and you get a little bit of everything, or you can make your own entree, or you can just select one of the options as your only dipper but you get a whole plate of it. You also get to choose your cooking style. For the vegan cooking style you can do anything except for the cast iron grill option, and then the bourguignonne option will come without the batters. Your dippers selections includes the Good Earth Vegetarian without the pastas, so you get either edamame or onion rings (no batter), vegan meatballs (polpettes), teriyaki silken tofu, and other veggies. Then you get two dipping sauces, a teriyaki and a sweet and sour along with the garlic and wine seasoning. Any entree also comes with a side of potatoes, broccoli and mushrooms. You dip your entrees into the oil for 1-2 minutes to cook and enjoy! We liked the entrees, but the tofu was a bit hard to fry since it was silken, and it still came out a bit squishy after frying for four minutes. But I did enjoy the veggies, polpettes and sauces even though the tofu was disappointing. The onion rings came out with no batter so we just ended up frying raw onions and then covering them with the garlic seasoning, which was still delish mixed in with the other veggies. This makes it really easy to make your own veggie stir fry, just fry all the veggies and tofu and mix together with one of the delicious sauces.
Grand Finale: Chocolate Dessert Fondue
There are two options for the vegan dessert: Enjoy Life vegan milk chocolate or Enjoy Life vegan dark chocolate fondue. Then you get pineapples, bananas, and strawberries to dip in it. Although we were hoping for a vegan cookie or cake or maybe dandies marshmallows, I still enjoyed the dessert! After all, strawberries and chocolate are one of my favorite things.
Overall, our four course dinner was amazing! The vegan option isn’t specifically stated on the menu, so you should tell the manager and your server that you want the whole 4 courses vegan. Our server was very knowledgeable about veganism and had a couple great conversations with us about it, even asking us about things like honey and other bug byproducts. The manager also kept coming out to us asking us how we were enjoying it and told us how he thinks this is the best vegan cheese and chocolate he has ever had. If you order the Good Earth Vegetarian instead of the build your own, I would suggest getting the edamame over the onion rings, and you can swap out any veggie for more tofu or the tofu for more veggies. If you get a chance to look at the chocolate menu (we didn’t) I remember there being some toppings that you can add into your chocolate fondue, like bananas from the bananas foster fondue or graham crackers (if you eat honey) from the smores fondue. Of course we will be going back! I would go back just for four courses of the cheese or chocolate. Now that we’ve done it once with all the bells and whistles, we know what we’ll get more of and what we’ll skip next time.
The Peaceful Plate 