Grasshopper is a vegan restaurant that serves all the greatest hits of Asian cuisine from wonton soup to tempura to chicken with broccoli without using any animal products. No oyster sauce, shrimp paste or pork stock. Instead of meat and fish, Grasshopper (1 North Beacon St., Allston) serves variations of marinated tofu or wheat gluten made to taste like fish or poultry or whatever the dish calls for.

Ideally, Grasshopper appeals to people who crave the taste and texture of meat but stopped eating it for philosophical or health reasons. The idea of ersatz animal flesh has a long history in Asia. Mock meat appears in Chinese feast menus and various forms of dimsum dumplings. Japanese Buddhists prepared mock goose as far back as the 15th century. A restaurant dedicated to meat analog may seem like overkill but the excited faces of the tattooed and dreadlocked crowd of activists and students seated in the restaurant seem to think it was the best thing since tofutti ice cream.

Because of my possible bias I brought along a kosher vegetarian friend for a second opinion. We ordered two dishes that were meatless by definition vegetable tempura and sautéed kale with mushrooms and potatoes. We were both curious about the beef chow fun and I insisted that we order the coconut curry pork. We had heard about the specialty of the house a taro nest with the full range of mock meat, so we ordered that as well.

The hot-and-sour soup was gigantic – twice what would be served at any Chinese restaurant. It looked like hot and sour soup lily buds, cloud ear mushrooms, little bits of tofu it was thick and satisfying. The kale was just as generous but less appealing. An entire bunch of wilted kale in the center of a thick, shiny, brown gravy littered with diced potatoes and reconstituted dried shitakes. We each took one bite and then pushed the plate to the side.

The tempura came next carrots, sweet potatoes, onions, red peppers and broccoli. The vegetables were crisp under the golden-crunchy batter and tasted of clean oil. The dipping sauce was sharp and salty with little bits of seaweed and scallions. The beef and pork dishes arrived at the same time. We were both disappointed to acknowledge them as below-average, Americanized Chinese restaurant food, broccoli, snow peas, carrots, in gloopy, sweet, brown corn starch sauce.

The taro nest was made up of taro fiber woven into an edible basket and filled with every type of mock meat thin sheets of pink tofu resembling undercooked turkey or rubbery fake shrimp, plus the same mushrooms and vegetables that we ate in various forms in all of our other dishes.

I went into Grasshopper hoping for some kind of alchemy pork without pork, goose without goose a miracle. But there were no miracles, just plate after heaping plate of generic Chinese food the kind of food I ate at hippie pads in college or at Chinese lunchtime buffets in Maine or rural Indiana The mock meat might be a fun novelty find for flesh-craving vegans, but everyone else, perhaps the vegans included, would be better off walking down that same block of North Beacon Street to any of the other Asian restaurants that survive on good cooking rather than on gimmicks and a built-in clientele.

As we were leaving, I saw one of the waitresses sit down at the booth in front of us with her dinner hot from the kitchen. Simple, stir-fried water cress with some jasmine rice on the side. It looked delicious.