The reason for my dislike of the dish can be summed up by the line repeated by many many tofu apologists: "The great thing about tofu is that it takes on the flavor of whatever you put it with." From this statement, a few key inferences may be drawn.
1. Tofu itself does not have that great of a flavor. If tofu were delicious, there wouldn't be a need to say how it doesn't detract from the surrounding flavors. So then, tofu is to food what the word 'basically' is to the English language: Add it in, and it doesn't actually contribute much to the sentence. Basically.
1.5 What is important to note is that the tofu must be incorporated into the dish for this effect to take place. The chunks of tofu in my dish were half the size of my fist. Tofu does not work by osmosis; you can't just toss a whole block into a curry and expect the block to taste like curry. Pieces the size of lego blocks would have been far more palatable.
2. The thing into which the tofu is introduced should be flavorful. Gelatinous protein dish plus flavorless slurry does not a good meal make. In this regard, the curry failed. Instead of being a spicy concoction to tempt my tastebuds, it was a weak, thin sauce with only the vaguest hints of curry. It's as though someone had only told the sauce what curry was supposed to taste like. For shame, vegans.
The ultimate failing of the meal is this: the best thing about my meal was that we ordered an appetizer platter of sweet potato fries. And going to a vegan restaurant to order sweet potato fries sounds.... well, that's actually a really good idea. If vegan restaurants went out of their way to show off the things which were vegan which most people would eat anyways, people wouldn't think vegans were so weird and cult-y. Things like chips with salsa, oreo's, nutter butters. Things like basic pasta dishes. Not things like smoothies made of spinach and bark.
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