Vegetarians have a friend in North Carolina—he’s Chris Rubinstein, the chef at Figs Market, a Raleigh, North Carolina, gourmet grocery store that also houses an eat-in/take-out café. Even though the market sells meat, Rubinstein tries to sneak as many vegetarian and vegan items as he can onto the buffet and into the prepared food case—and customers are eating it up. “The majority of people who buy our food don’t consider themselves vegetarian or vegan,” Rubinstein told Gourmet News, “but they just enjoy it.” A vegan for eight years, Rubinstein worked as a chef at Whole Foods, where he developed his “world-famous” vegan chicken salad made with soy-based mock chicken and a zesty Carolina-style barbecue made with tofu. At Figs Market, his popular creations include a vegetarian torte made with puff pastry and wild-mushroom tamales. “I’m trying to get people to realize that vegan and vegetarian cuisine isn’t just sticks and twigs,” he says.

Chef Spotlight:
Chris Rubinstein

Age: 25
Restaurant or company: Figs Market, Raleigh, North Carolina

Do you have companion animals? If so, can you describe them?
I have a cat named Balki and a beagle named Memphis that we adopted from a friend. Balki beats up Memphis.

How long have you been a chef?
About eight years.

What type of cuisine do you focus on?
Since I don’t, at the moment, work in an all-vegetarian establishment, I’m trying to introduce vegan cuisine through several different styles. I do tend to focus more on Asian-influenced dishes because that is what I enjoy.

Do you have a specialty?
I like to revise comfort dishes, [the] “stick-to-your-ribs” style of food. I like the way it makes you feel, and I want people to feel good when they eat my food.

What are the most important elements in cooking great vegetarian cuisine?
Choose the best produce you can, and try to stay in season. Since vegetables will be the main focus in some form, it’s best to make sure they’re good quality. It’s something that’s often overlooked.

What is the key to getting meat-eaters to enjoy vegetarian food?
Start them off with what they are familiar with. Many people are afraid of new things when it comes to food, so ease them into it. I have certain dishes that are made specifically for skeptical people—once they see that it’s good, they usually are more than willing to try other things.

What, in your opinion, does the future of plant-based cuisine hold?
More and more restaurants are adding vegetarian options to their menus. In bigger cities, it’s much easier to find all-veg restaurants; in my area, you would have to drive for hours to find one. There is a large demand, even in smaller cities, so in the near future we will see more people choosing to live a vegan lifestyle because it’s more convenient for them than it is now.

Do you have a favorite cooking method?
Everything tastes better fried, but I love to sauté. I like to see how high I can flip the vegetables in the air. I’m also a bit of a “pyro,” so cooking with alcohol is always fun.

Where did you train to become a chef?
I attended Wake Tech Community College. They were really great with helping me develop my skills as a vegan chef. I honed my other senses to cook with since I wasn’t able to use taste all the time. Even though I was very much against working with meat, it taught me so much about becoming a chef that I use to this day.

What are your favorite ingredients to work with?
I’m fortunate to have a company by the name of Delight Soy not too far from me. They carry a wide variety of soy products and seitan. Their mock chicken is unbelievable—anybody who tries it is addicted to it. I have to make extra because I find several pieces missing when I walk away from my station. It’s very easy to make great dishes using their products.

Even though I personally find eggplant to be disgusting, I like to make new recipes with it. It’s a very pretty vegetable. Miso is something I’m finding more uses for—it adds great flavor.

In your opinion, what vegetarian dish or type of food is most frequently poorly prepared and why?
I tend to stay away from tofu dishes in traditional restaurants. It usually turns into a gooey sponge.

If you were stranded on a deserted island and could only eat one kind of ethnic food, what would it be?
Even though Chinese and Thai are my favorites, I would have to pick Middle Eastern. I think it would be healthier because of the variety of ingredients.

Do vegetarian restaurants face any special obstacles that meat-based restaurants don’t have to face?
They face the stigma of what vegetarian restaurants are supposed to be. Too many people turn away from the thought of all-vegetarian places: “What can I eat there?” is usually their response. In the end, the only thing that really matters is whether or not the food is good.

Can you give us one great cooking tip for aspiring vegetarian chefs?
Don’t take yourself too seriously—be able to laugh at yourself and your mistakes. Don’t lose sight of why you started cooking in the first place. Don’t worry about trends too much because they will soon be just articles in a fancy magazine that no one is reading. Just focus on what you want to do, and don’t worry about other people.

What are some ingredients that you recommend vegetarians and vegans have in their kitchens to cook with?
I always seem to need nutritional yeast but never have it.

Are there any newer vegetarian products on the market that you are particularly fond of?
The Tofurky line of products and Follow Your Heart soy cheese.

Choose one area to give some specialty tips for:
How best to prepare seitan. Here’s some information from a class I taught on seitan:

Seitan: A Quick Overview
First developed by Zen Buddhists in China and Japan more than 1,000 years ago, seitan has been a staple food among vegetarian monks, Russian wheat farmers, and peasants of Southeast Asia. Traditionally, when simmered in a broth of soy sauce or tamari, ginger, garlic, and [k]ombu (seaweed), it is called “seitan.” With other methods, it may also be referred to as “wheat gluten.”

Seitan is derived from the protein portion of wheat, which has had the starch removed through a series of rinses. Before the gluten is extracted from the wheat, it needs to be developed by kneading. As you work the dough, the strands of protein become more elastic and more toned, just like what happens to our muscles when we exercise. I use a mixture of white flour and whole-wheat bread flour because the wheat germ and bran create some space in the gluten, allowing it to absorb flavors. If you use all-white flour, it will become too dense and gummy.

As you rinse and stretch the dough, there will probably be a point where you will start to panic and fear that you are dissolving everything and [that] the dough will wash away. The gluten will stay put, but you need to be patient and wait for it to separate from the starch. About 70 percent of the dough is starch, so you will be left with a much smaller portion than you began with. But when you cook the gluten, it will expand as it absorbs the broth.

If your gluten turns out too rubbery, it means you have overwashed it. As you wash, make sure you can still see a fair amount of bran specks and that the ball isn’t too firm. If you slice a piece of seitan after cooking it, and it is white in the middle, it was too dense (overkneaded) and couldn’t absorb enough cooking broth. If you drastically underknead the dough, the gluten will not have a chance to form and will wash away during the rinsing. But if you have underkneaded only slightly, the ball will just turn out a little looser.

Seitan can be frozen in its cooking liquid for up to six months and will not change color or texture when thawed.

• Homemade Seitan

• Lentil Cakes With Tahini-Horseradish Sauce

• Seitan Pepper Steak

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