The pleasures of veganism, not so long ago the far frontier of meat-free dining, are not as elusive as they used to be. The strictures of raw-food enthusiasts, macrobiotic restaurants and paleo devotees make the demands of vegans, who demand only that their food be free of animal products, seem almost reasonable. In great stretches of Los Angeles, vegan is the new mainstream. In the most progressive of the world's modernist restaurants now, places like Noma, Arpege, Alma, and Coi, meat may appear only briefly in the course of long tasting menus, which can easily be made vegan.

Phillip Frankland Lee's Beverly Hills restaurant Scratch Bar is well known for its sweetbread-driven take on chicken and waffles, squid served in a box fashioned from dehydrated potatoes, and bone marrow tucked into logs of toasted bread. He is an aficionado of the squishier side of the animal kingdom. You would not be surprised if he served you ants, rolled pig spleen, or deep-fried tendon, or even all of the above combined into a single dish.

But his new Studio City bistro, the Gadarene Swine, may be the first purely vegan restaurant ever opened by a frankly carnivorous chef, an animal-free zone populated by hummus with seaweed chips served in clay planters and dips served in simulated birds' nests, and even the ice cream is made out of coconut instead of milk.

The Gadarene Swine is not the place to contemplate a carrot. It is a place to try a vegan take on pasta puttanesca and become vaguely nostalgic for the taste of anchovy.

While you might expect a populist vegan restaurant to embrace alternative proteins, or an ambitious chef exploring the genre to indulge in the kind of vegetable worship you see at places like Red Medicine and Commissary, Lee's cooking is basically the same as it is at Scratch Bar, except without the meat: housemade everything, tons of pickles, lots of crunchy dehydrated vegetables, pistachios everywhere, and simple flavors enhanced with olive oil, lemon and salt.

Where a meal at Scratch Bar typically starts with charred, half-baked rounds of sourdough served with uni, at the new restaurant the toast is served with a kind of reduced tomato pure instead. Mussel shooters become tomato shooters instead you eat the caramelized tomato off a toothpick, down the shot of tomato-infused sake over which it had been suspended, and finish by scraping up the avocado mousse at the bottom of the glass.

Instead of Squid in a Box you will find Vegetables in a Box that tiny crate of crisped potato plunked into a drift of blackened eggplant pure and filled with thin disks of asparagus, kernels of sweet corn, pickled shimeji mushrooms, and whatever happens to be on hand that day. The effect is basic yet complex, depending more on the delight of the presentation than on the mash-up of flavors.

The last time I was in, Lee introduced his PB&J: an open-faced concoction of freshly churned peanut butter topped with smashed prunes, thinly sliced onions, pickled vegetables and arugula, like what would happen if your dad absent-mindedly garnished your lunchtime sandwich as if it were Black Forest ham on rye.

At the Gadarene Swine, uni isn't the new kale,; kale is the new uni, served as crisp baked chips with a bit of lemon, or fried and served over a bewilderingly rich pure.

You can sit at the bar and have Lee serve you a 10-course $85 tasting menu, which includes some of the favorites from the regular menu but also Japanese eggplant skins toasted crisp and heaped with diced vegetables; a bowl of roasted purple carrots with sweet potato pure; and sliced strawberries formed into a kind of a corral around a tart salad.

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The Gadarene Swine is a carnivore chef's complicated vegan venture

Despite the Plazas new policy, the head waiter, Denis Courtiade, said he had rapidly procured and served steak tartare to an American diner who insisted on it, adding: I suspected we might be on camera.

Vegetarian food is gaining acceptance in France as health and environmental concerns turn the French away from red meat. Meat consumption fell by 15 per cent between 2003 and 2010, according to Crdoc, an organisation that monitors consumer and lifestyle trends.

Vegetarians are now estimated to account for three to five per cent of the population, or as many as 3.3 million, mostly urban professionals, according to Manon Dupr of the market research company Mintel.

Other estimates are somewhat lower, at about two percent, but Ms Dupr said: Vegetarian food is becoming more attractive to French consumers even if the UK market is still much bigger.

The number of vegetarians and vegans in Britain is estimated at up to 12 per cent of the population, or more than 7.5 million, according to Mintel.

The French tend to be more firmly rooted in traditional gastronomy and vegan meals are banned in school canteens. However, food companies are starting to offer more vegetarian ready-meals and top chefs are rethinking their menus.

Laurent Delarbre of the celebrated Tour dArgent in Paris said: Weve added vegetable-based, gluten- and nut-free options to our menus because we get an average of three requests a week for these kind of dishes.

Jol Robuchon, who like Mr Ducasse operates restaurants around the world, said: The cuisine of the next ten years will be vegetarian.

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France develops taste for vegetarian cuisine