Great news for vegetarians and vegans, you don’t have to miss out on Dim Sum delights, Baozinn now has an even bigger vegan and veggie choice

I really like the Soho Baozinn which is minutes from the office. I even like it when it’s so busy I get put in the dreaded basement where you tend to feel like a (well-fed) hostage.

Baoziinn Soho’s vegan and vegetarian menu was launched earlier this year to great success and so now, working with Omni Foods  they’ve created Green Feast.

There’s a big choice of soup dumplings, as well as pan fried and steamed dumplings, at both the Soho and London Bridge Baozinn, all sorted by region, so we go to try as many as we can.

As usual at Baozinn, ordering is done by ticking boxes on a menu card, the Green Feast having its own special card. If you don’t see it, ask for it. I roughly add up the choices and make it around thirty five, so there are a lot of options.

Battling a cucumber glut on my allotment, I am keen for new eating ideas so we have to have cucumber with soy sauce, chilli oil, vinegar and garlic. These are the Persian cucumbers, smaller than English ones and have been cut into stumpy cylinders and piled with the sauce.

The crisp cold crunch of the cucumber against a fairly fiery sauce is wonderful; I could eat these all day, but fried tofu demands attention. Small pieces covered in fried garlic, chilli and, I think, Szechuan pepper flakes, they are very addictive and chopstick-friendly.

Soup dumplings need careful handling, they need to be eaten in one bite, that soup inside can be very hot, so we give ours time to cool a little. Once safe to eat we find them to be full of Omni meat seasoned with white pepper. The soup is very good and the Omni meat has a convincing pork-like texture.

Omni is  also to be found in a Southern China style dumpling of chives, peanuts and pickled radish,  and also in Shao Mai which are traditionally pork or shrimp. Some pan-fried pure vegetable dumplings are packed out with a whole greengrocer’s variety of veg and these we happily dunk in chilli oil.

We don’t miss real meat until the Mapo. This is usually pork mince and tofu, here the mince is replaced by emerald green soybeans. This changes the texture profile, which is fine but overall the dish lacks the Sichuan punch of Baozinn’s regular Mapo, which I do love. A bit watery too, for some reason.

We also scarf down a bowl of rice with vegetables, just to make sure we have packed out any remaining crevices in our stomachs.

With such a large choice of veggie/vegan treats I shall have to go back and try different ones, but what we had was very good. All the delights of dimsum and then some! Rejoice O ye vegans.

baoziinn.com London Bridge and Soho.