dietary restrictions
TL;DR probably not a good restaurant for vegans, and please email us before dining if you have a question about dietary accommodation.
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The long of it:
I will start out by saying something simple. If you are interested in eating at the cafe but have inquiries about dietary accommodations, the best way to check in is to email us. We will do our damndest to answer and set you on the right course. We have a terrible old phone, and we can usually not hear anyone on it, and a lot of times I am alone here when the phone rings, and I am trying not to burn stuff, and I don't want to talk to anyone on the phone, especially if it might be DoorDash or Verizon or someone pretending to be Verizon or pretending to be National Grid. If you are calling this place outside of our business hours, please be aware that the way I feel when the phone rings, most especially when it keeps ringing and ringing and ringing because you keep calling and calling, is very bad. So don't call unless we are open if you wouldn't mind. Emailing is so wonderful.
The second thing I want to say is that we can't do vegan food here, and I have never made any claims to the contrary. I am known for cooking meat, and our entire instagram is photos of meat, and I am a meat person. For our third birthday as a business, we made a one hundred and forty pound man entirely out of bologna, and then we carved him up and made everyone sandwiches. I may be wrong, but it seems like most folks who keep a vegan diet are trying not to eat animals, because they believe doing so is bad either morally or for the environment. But if you are trying to spend your money here at Cafe Mutton, even if you don't eat meat, I am going to use 20-30% of the money you spend here to buy more meat and cook more animals. I should mention here, as well, that I love and have immense respect for animals, but that does not prevent me from eating them and cooking them. Rather, I seek out farms that I trust and purchase meat only from folks who feed, raise, and treat their animals well for the duration of their lives. And so eating a salad with a no-egg dressing (the egg, which, by the way was neither missed nor suffered by the hen who laid it and was not a chick but really rather a bird period) will not help to save the animals; you would do better by avoiding this business altogether.
When it comes to other allergies, we are sometimes able to accommodate. I am careful to train my staff about allergens in dishes, and if we are able to accommodate your need, we will do everything in our power to prepare your dish without allergen cross-contact so that you can eat safely and peacefully. Sometimes, we are not able to accommodate certain allergies. Due to the fact that our menu changes every day, we sometimes have fewer dairy-free, gluten-free, or vegetarian items available depending on what we are cooking in a moment. It is important for me to make two things clear here: first, we do not offer any and all modifications to dishes we are serving in order to accommodate allergies. Second, on those days when we have more dairy or gluten or meat on our menu, we are not trying to foist upon you any special or specific kind of ire.
When I opened the cafe, I wanted to serve a menu that I believed in fully. I did not want to put a single thing on the menu that I wasn't excited about. And I have generally done well to stick to this compass of mine. As a person who grew up with a very, very difficult relationship to food and my body--as a person who struggled with severe eating disorders for over a decade--I decided that I was not going to run a restaurant where we had the anonymous cobb salad that could be modified seventeen different ways. We would not serve yolkless eggs to folks. We would not strip our ingredients of their integrity by offering them as an "added protein." And I am not saying any of this to shrug off the reality of food allergies or other restrictions--because they are real and more common all the time. I am just saying that my approach to cooking is based on what I want to make and how I feel I can best represent the materials I have to work with. And sometimes that means that even if we are serving a mushroom and raclette omelette, for example, and someone wants to hold the cheese, we probably won't. Maybe that makes this place a shit restaurant. Maybe it makes me shit. I really don't know, but if it helps to say so, maybe it's not a restaurant at all but rather some bitch ass store.
A lot of folks seem to be offended by my lack of interest in creating a menu that is "for everyone." And I can't stress enough that you should not be. This is not personal--this is about being realistic. Every business cannot truly provide every thing. Take clothing, for example. If you go into a store and you like a shirt, you normally are not able to bring it to the sales associate and demand that the long sleeves be made short. You are not really able to walk into a store for leather jackets and become incensed by the fact that they are not able to go in the back and make you a denim one. You can hate leather jackets. Hell, you can even find folks that will meet up with you and go protest outside the leather jacket store. But separately and in the meantime, you are allowed to go to the Macy's and get yourself a Levi's.
What I am trying to say is that not every food business serves all food. And I believe this is also where things get a little funny for folks who believe I am being an egotistical fuck. Believe me, I think I get why a person would think so, especially if they've never worked in a kitchen before. Folks will often see a few different menu items and wonder why we won't agree to just take a little bit of column A and put it on a plate with a little bit of Columns B and C. But it's actually very hard to produce quality food when rather than being able to produce ten different menu items, now suddenly you have this quite expansive set of combinations.
Imagine cooking for twenty people at once, and rather than at most cooking two of everything on a ten-item menu menu, you are now cooking twenty different unique dishes. I am certainly no genius, and I probably have long covid, but I don't think many people's brains work well enough to execute that successfully or remotely quickly. Most cooks who are not set up in a diner kitchen can't. Even small adjustments on dishes can be challenging to complete properly during a fast-paced service. In our kitchen, often staffed with two people at a time, we are not limitless.
I've had folks suggest that my unwillingness to produce off the cuff vegetarian dishes at the drop of a hat is a decision I make based on my aforementioned giant ego. The suggestion certainly piques my curiosity but not quite long enough before I find myself wondering--what kind of an ego does a person have to have to waltz into a small, independent establishment expecting a custom dish or menu to be designed for them in a moment? Our menus change daily here at the cafe, meaning that it takes quite a bit of attention to execute our dishes without the familiarity and muscle memory a static menu allows a cook to build. So it's not very easy for us to quickly prepare something else on the fly. And that's why I think it's important to set some expectations.
We have begun to update our menus on our website more regularly, which is exciting for people who want to stay in the loop with what we are serving each day. But we do not list dietary notes on those menus, and it is not safe to assume that an item is veg or pesc or other just because it sounds like it could be. There is really no harm in double checking, but if you would rather raw dog your life, please know that it might do to have a backup plan. Again, if you are vegan, you will generally not have an exciting time here.
At a time when business could be a lot better, I do hate to have to say this honest thing, but I will say it because it is the honest to god truth. It is not on me if you invite your vegan or vegetarian buddy to come here for dinner with you and your meat eating friends. It is kind to prioritize their needs and take them to one of the many nearby places that serve excellent vegetarian and vegan food. Bringing someone who only eats vegetables to a meat restaurant named Cafe Mutton is an outlandish thing to do. If you have made this work before and are happy coming here and rolling the dice, please continue to enjoy. We genuinely love that some of you are freaks enough to live this way and have fun. It works for you! If, however, you are a general Karen who feels like we owe you anything you want (which you will, indubitably, refer to as the bare minimum), carry on down the road and leave us to our meaty little dumpster fire.