Why a restaurateur changed his menu to vegan and how he fooled some of his meat-eating customers

Gary Stokes admits he pulled a bit of a fast one on some of his customers. The sole owner of Hemingway’s Bar & Grill, a long-standing pillar of Discovery Bay’s South Plaza, has now turned the restaurant’s menu completely vegan. But before he’d even told anyone about his plans last year, he switched the chilli to a vegan recipe without telling a soul.

“Because all it said on the menu was our Infamous Rude Boy Chilli,” he says. “Served with tortilla or rice. It never said it was vegan, but it never said that it wasn’t. So people had actually been eating it for about six months without meat and nobody noticed.”

Stokes’ journey to becoming vegan dates back to 2010 and his work with Sea Shepherd, a non-profit marine preservation group that has garnered controversy for its hardline activism. Stokes joined the crew on a journey to Antarctica on an anti-whaling campaign and lived on a boat for four months. The meals served on the ship were completely vegan, so Stokes took the chance to change his diet in an isolated setting.

“What better time to go vegan,” he says. “You’re not running out to Macker’s (McDonald’s) or anything like that.”

When Stokes returned to Hong Kong, he reverted to vegetarianism and then went fully vegan about two years ago. He says he didn’t lose a lot of weight after the switch because he didn’t cut out carbohydrates from his diet, but he did notice a very apparent cognitive effect.

“It was a little bit difficult coming back from Antarctica because it wasn’t like that was an everyday lifestyle setting. When you have someone cooking you great vegan meals every day like on the ship, it’s easy, but when you’re at home it’s a lot harder. But I definitely felt clearer minded and stuff like that.”

He says back then, being vegan was most definitely not something that had hit the mainstream.