Celebrity garnish fails to lift vegan joint's bland fare

Hello sky, hello sunshine, hello VBites, the vegan restaurant in Brighton opened last year by Heather Mills, as part of her crusade to save the planet. I think, perusing her menu of vegan burgers, non-dairy milk shakes boosted with pea protein, and cupcakes made with oil instead of butter. You have got to hand it to the girl.

The former wife of Sir Paul McCartney and one-time model, Mills has reinvented herself as an animal rights activist and a UN Association Goodwill Ambassador.

Cheese for meat

Like Mills, VBites is strictly vegan — which means no meat, no animal products and no animal by-products are used in the preparation of food. Dishes are made with soya-based substitute "meats" and "cheeses", while coffee is laced with rice, quinoa, soy, oat or nut milks.

"We want to take the pressure off the planet and give our animals a happier life," Mills declares.

VBites, which Mills opened a year ago, is situated in Hove Lagoon, on a strip of land that runs between the main road and the beach on the west of Brighton and Hove.

Despite its tremendous location the restaurant is deserted. Does it ever get busy? "Oh yes. Sunny, summer weekend lunches are busy," a waitress tells me, somehow failing to spot that this is a sunny, summer weekend lunchtime.

Yet, according to Mills, VBites has been a huge success.

And let us get over with the lunch quickly; for if you are not disposed to ordering meat substitutes, then you are, perhaps, not disposed to like them. For at this restaurant, the menu is meat obsessed, featuring fake chicken, burgers and fishcakes, topped with synthetic fake cheeses.

This is one aspect of veganism that I don't understand. If you hate meat, why not eat meat alternatives instead of meat substitutes? I don't mean to be rude but the VBites chicken nuggets look like albino goose droppings, with a flavour that, I think, is not dissimilar.

Nowhere close to the real thing

The fishcakes taste like wet cardboard; the hot dogs are like tubes of cork flavoured with liquid hickory smoke; and the pizza with cheddar cheese has an air of trodden vegan roadkill about it.

However, what is surprising is not that Mills's soya meats are not to a carnivore's taste; it is that everything else is of poor quality. The orange juice is not fresh; the lettuce and the tomatoes in the Greek salad are bland; the grim little olives are of the cheapest pack variety.

The core of Mills's vegan food business is the soya-based meat substitutes on the menu. These are produced by a company called Redwood, to which Mills is closely connected.

She appears to be using VBites as a launchpad for her own range of Redwood vegan products, including a frozen vegan pizza range, which she hopes will be in supermarkets soon.

Despite her big ideas, one can't help but suspect that Mills is her own meat substitute for Paul's first wife Linda McCartney, who did all this kind of thing years ago and whose Vegemince is still a supermarket bestseller. Still, you can't blame her for trying, even if the VBites food is pretty awful.

It is not just the dearth of customers, nor the casual lack of attention to detail but the overriding suspicion that what really interests Mills is not the wellbeing of the planet but the extension of Brand Mills.

Discordant note

Strangely enough, according to staff I spoke to, none of the Vbites chefs and only one of the waiting staff is vegan. Never mind. One of the most regular weekend lunch customers at VBites is, apparently, one H. Mills, who always orders the Hearty VBites Burger, washed down with a glass of refreshment. "She never finishes the burger," a spy tells me. I bet she doesn't!