This is not good news.
A group of friends in the USA were suspicious of their local vegan restaurant. The plant-eaters had a feeling they were being served products containing egg and milk, even though the restaurant explicitly advertised their entire menu as vegan.
You need to get over to this website to read the full exposé, but the highlight has to be the covert after hours dumpster dive to discover multiple food packets with non-vegan ingredient lists.
I’m not sure how the owners and/or kitchen staff of Bamboo Kitchen thought they could get away with doing this or why they seemingly don’t give a damn about the ethical and health choices/requirements of their customers.
Word of warning to restaurants selling food to vegans. Make sure it’s vegan or we will find out and we will be mad.
Obligatory hat tip to the noted 2009 “Operation pancake”, in which your friend QuarryGirl achieved global geek fame by setting up a sterile food testing laboratory in her kitchen. To catch some Californian places pulling the same nastiness.
http://archives.quarrygirl.com/tag/operation-pancake/
if you check the website internet archive snapshot from September last year they were saying they are a vegetarian restaurant, and the only mention of vegan was in their email address (which is now updated!)
http://web.archive.org/web/20150919155932/http://www.bamboo-garden.co/
Part of why people thought it was vegan was the staff telling them it was vegan. That is part of the anecdotal evidence given by the people investigating.
That’s true! Really naughty 🙁 It’s like Wetherspoon’s telling their customers what they want to hear – as one of their staff commented on my blog post! Crazy really! 🙁
(and even the big sign outside says “Bamboo Garden Vegetarian Cuisine”) I think we need to remember that places and companies change. We’ve seen many companies change from vegan to vegetarian, especially on accidentally vegan products. We just need to be vigilant and make sure we’re sharing the news with people, not blindly assuming things are vegan forever because they were before… 🙁