Veggie House: What’s Vegetarian Editorial Review

Veggie House bills itself as the only vegetarian Chinese restaurant in Chicago’s Chinatown. The menu backs that up. Nothing on it contains meat or fish. The kitchen does use eggs and dairy in a handful of dishes, so this is a vegetarian restaurant with a large vegan subsection, not a fully vegan one.

The menu is long, organized the way a full-service Chinese restaurant’s would be. Not scaled down for a niche audience. A mushroom section leans on the ingredient’s naturally meaty texture instead of a soy substitute: Three Cup Sauce Lion’s Mane, Braised Lion’s Mane, Salt and Pepper Shiitake. A separate tofu section covers Mapo Tofu, Salt and Pepper Tofu, and Kung Pao Tofu, the classic Sichuan preparation, chilies, peanuts, a sweet-savory sauce, rebuilt around tofu instead of chicken.

Want the format of a meat dish without the meat? The entrees lean on soy protein. Veggie House Soy Beef. Mongolian Soy Beef. Broccoli Soy Beef. All three appear on the menu. So do Sweet & Sour and Orange Plant-Based Chicken, in the mushroom section. Even the fried rice extends the approach. A Seafood Pineapple Fried Rice uses plant-based seafood, not the real thing, consistent with the no-meat-or-fish claim.

Soups run from a simple Hot and Sour to a Wonton Soup with a vegetarian filling. Salads include a Seaweed Salad and a Mango Salad, plus the standard house version. Noodle and rice dishes cover real ground too. Pad Thai Noodles. Singapore Noodles. A Curry Fried Rice. All three sit on the same menu, proof the kitchen pulls from beyond strictly Cantonese or Sichuan tradition. Dessert includes a Vegan Ice Cream and a couple of Tiramisu options.

Because the whole kitchen is vegetarian, there’s no risk of a dish arriving with hidden meat stock or fish sauce. That’s a real concern at standard Chinese restaurants, where those show up in sauces without appearing on the printed menu. Here, the kitchen was never built around animal stock in the first place.

Hours run Wednesday through Monday, 11:30am to 9pm. Closed Tuesdays. Takeout, delivery, and catering are all available alongside dine-in. Reviews reflect a solid local reputation, a few hundred of them, steady and positive rather than new or untested. For a vegetarian exploring Chinatown, Veggie House solves a real problem: a full Chinese menu, familiar dish names, none of the usual guesswork about what’s actually in the sauce.