A customer sent us photos to ask if her chicken was chicken

What she was looking at was soy curls, cooked the way we always cook them. It is the nicest thing anyone has said about our kitchen this year and it arrived as a complaint.

Almost nobody eats a chicken breast for the chicken. Think about what one is doing in a Thai green curry. It is a mild, chewy, savoury thing that carries the sauce and gives you something to bite, and those are jobs. A soy curl does the same jobs, and because it is porous the whole way through instead of dense like muscle, it carries more sauce rather than less.

Run that test on any dish. Where the protein is the event, the thing you look at when the plate lands, the swap fails. Where it is carrying the sauce and the spice, it swaps so cleanly that people send us photographs.

Ninety-one of our entrees are built around meat and sixty-six have a plant-based twin, which is the same dish cooked twice with the middle swapped out. You can read the test off the names. Curry Club Butter Chicken becomes Curry Club Butt'r Tofu, and the ingredient list is the first one with the chicken lifted out and nothing else disturbed.

Then there is Steak Your Claim, a vegan entree with its own name and no twin on the menu. A chimichurri sirloin is the event on its plate, so a plant dish standing near it has to be good on its own terms.

If you cook for a household where one person eats meat and another does not, that is the whole trick. Build the dish, hold the protein out, cook the two separately and combine at the end. A curry, a stir fry or a taco filling will take it, and nobody at that table is eating a compromise.

She went looking for the difference with a camera and could not find it. That is not because we are good at imitation. It is because the chicken was never what that dish was about.