Being a vegetarian in the UK is much easier than being one in France, the USA or China, and nearly every place you eat will have several vegetarian options.  The Vegetarian Visitor book might be potentially helpful for people who insist on eating in vegetarian-only establishments, but with only about 300 places listed, one would have to be very careful about planning one's route in the UK if restricting oneself in such a way.  Suppose you are visiting the city of Bristol, England's sixth largest city, and a place I know quite well.  There are 7 vegetarian places listed in the guide: 5 cafés, one pub, and on Thai restaurant.  One of the cafés is Café Maitreya a place declared to be Britain's top vegetarian restaurant, and I'd never heard of it, so the Vegetarian Visitor was useful to me.  However, these days the Internet is more useful than a book, even a book that is updated yearly.  If you enter "Bristol vegetarian" into a search engine, you will discover the Vegan Bristol website that has much more information about eating vegetarian in Bristol; there's the veggieheaven.com site that has a page devoted to Bristol; and Googlemaps will give you hundreds of vegetarian listings for Bristol and the surrounding area.  So vegetarians will do better doing a quick Internet search rather than using a book. Of course, people don't always have Internet access when travelling, so having the Vegetarian Visitor with you when a tourist could be a useful backup.

Link: Vegetarian Visitor website

© 2008 Christian Perring

Christian Perring, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Dowling College, New York.