Eat your vegetables on Sundays at Offshore Ale

Local restaurant and brewery Offshore Ale in Oak Bluffs has started hosting Veggie-Centric Sundays, and will continue to do so through the season. Utilizing ways to get creative with vegetables and grains, Sunday lead cook Silvani da Silva is excited for what guests will be experiencing.

The Veggie-Centric Sunday menu consists of about eight to 10 menu offerings, including a soup of the day, along with a special appetizer, vegetarian entrées, and a brick oven special. For the pescatarians, the menu often has a fish entrée available. Vegetable-focused menus allow a restaurant to really focuses on the ingredients and they tend to push their creativity to higher levels. To start, there’s the Zucchini Chips ($10.98), served with the thickest, most delectable tzatziki sauce. The chips are ever so crispy, coated in panko breadcrumbs and fried to perfection, then dunked in that housemade sauce. 

A plant-based diet can be good for your health, but it’s also great for the environment and your wallet. Vegetarian meals are packed with good-for-you nutrients and minerals (even when covered in breadcrumbs and panko like those zucchini chips were, it was a smarter choice than fried chicken wings), but also take into consideration how much better it is for the environment. Taking that same example of the crispy zucchini chips versus the crispy chicken wings, growing and harvesting zucchini is easier on and better for on the environment than raising chickens; the zucchini requires land and water, at most. Producing chickens not only requires land and water, but also feeding, care, hiring trained employees — it all adds to the cost. Consider having a plant-based meal once a day, or if that’s too much, try it once a week.

As for the entrees the spaghetti squash was filled with vegetable mock bolognese made of lentils, olives, and more, the half-squash was then topped with Parmesan and Asiago cheese, broiled to perfection and served with two slices of garlic bread. The squash was perfectly cooked, resulting in noodles that had a bit of bite, not soggy or mushy. The mock bolognese was flavorful and tasted like it had been simmered with care, infused with herbs and spices. Plus, who doesn’t love toasty, melty cheese on top?

If you’re looking for something with more raw vegetables, try their Power Bowl Salad ($14.98). At under $15, this salad can be shared between two veggie-loving friends, it’s that big. It’s packed with baby spinach, baby kale, mixed greens, roasted zucchini, and other vegetables on a bed of couscous and served with a side of the zestiest, most delicious carrot-ginger dressing ever; you’re in for a treat. Honestly, that dressing should be Offshore’s next venture; bottle it up and sell it to the masses, it’s that good.

Something vegetarians complain about is being served a hockey puck of a veggie burger, typically frozen and store-bought. Here, you’ll be happy to hear, the veggie burger was created by Silvani herself after endless testing and tasting. It can be served completely gluten-free, since she goes as far as using certified gluten-free oats to bind the burger together. This option is not grain-free, as it does have quinoa. It’s flavorful, moist, and holds together well and when it’s topped with fresh avocado slices, you’ll never be able to go back to those frozen burgers again.

After tasting a few of the vegetarian entrées, you might be pleasantly surprised to be stuffed to the gills. If your fear of eating vegetarian is that you’ll go hungry, fear not — you won’t. 

Be sure to visit Offshore Ale for Veggie-Centric Sundays, for lunch and dinner. Check out their full menu online at offshoreale.com and like them on Facebook at facebook.com/OffshoreAle/.