Lucky Vegetarian: What’s Vegetarian Editorial Review

Lucky Vegetarian is a Chinese restaurant in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, and every dish it serves is vegetarian. Its Chinese name is 吉祥斋, and the owners call it the first vegetarian restaurant in Sunset Park. You walk down a flight of stairs to a basement dining room at 5101 8th Avenue.

What to order

Most dishes carry the name of a meat or a fish, so a first look at the menu can throw you. The menu photos on the site list Peking Style Spare Ribs at $22.50, Crispy Duck at $15.95, Dry Braised Fish at $21, Roast Pork at $15, Veg. Double Cooked Pork at $21, and Lamb Stick at $7. The cooks build all of them from soy, wheat, and mushrooms, with no animal flesh. OpenStreetMap tags the cuisine as Chinese and Buddhist, and Buddhist temple cooks are the ones who made mock meat a fixture of Chinese menus. An OpenStreetMap editor who ate there left the same warning on the map listing, naming “Turnip w. Beef Sirloin” and “Pickle Cabbage Fish” as soy or wheat dishes.

If you’d rather skip the mock meat, order Home Style Bean Curd ($20), Ma Po Tofu ($18), or Lettuce Wrap ($21). The cold dishes cost $10 to $12. You can pick Bean Jelly, Sichuan Style Cold Noodles, Sweet and Sour Kelp, or a seaweed salad the menu calls Durvillea Antartic. Each fried rice costs $12, and you can choose Roast Pork Fried Rice or Chinese Mahogany Fried Rice, which gets its flavor from the young leaves of the Chinese toon tree.

The site has no text menu. You get a gallery of 15 dish photos instead, each one labeled in Chinese and English with a price. Those 15 are a sample, not the full list, so you’ll find more dishes at the table. We took every price here from those photos. Prices change, so call ahead if a number matters to your budget.

The kitchen

The site promises freshly made vegetarian dishes daily. The whole menu is vegetarian, so no meat ever shares a wok with your food. The restaurant says it cooks with beans, mushrooms, whole grains, and leafy greens. It doesn’t say whether any dish uses eggs or dairy. Vegans should ask before they order, especially for the fried rice and the mock duck.

Practical notes

Lucky Vegetarian serves every day from 11 am to 8:30 pm, according to its own site. OpenStreetMap still lists a 10 pm close, so go by the restaurant’s hours and call 718-871-0399 if you plan a late dinner. Look for the awning on 51st Street, where the stairs go down to the entrance. The site also has an Order Now button for online orders.

The bilingual photo labels help if you don’t read Chinese. Show your server the photo of the dish you want, or call ahead to check that a dish is on today’s menu before you make the trip.

For a first visit, take at least one friend and split the Peking Style Spare Ribs, the Ma Po Tofu, and a plate of fried rice.