Salt Lake-area restaurants are more vegetarian-friendly than one might guess, says Andrea Mather, the author of "VegOut," a vegetarian restaurant guide for Denver and Salt Lake City.

In addition to meatless meals, they also offer many vegan options (made without meat, eggs or dairy products).

"The vegan consciousness in Salt Lake far surpasses the Denver-Boulder area," Mather, a Colorado resident, said by phone from her home. "It's a great food town; it's easy to eat your way through it, which is what I did."

Her food finds included roasted veggie tacos at the Blue Iguana; acorn squash linguini at Oasis Cafe; crisp fried bean curd simmered in tomato sauce at Cafe Trang; potato gnocchi at Caffe Molise; lentil soup at Cedars of Lebanon; Kung Pao Tofu at Ever Green House Cafe; a creamy Greek feta and tomato sandwich at Frank Granato Importing Co.; hummus and baba ghanoush at Mazza; spaghetti squash Florentine at the Singing Cricket; and dark chocolate mole at the Red Iguana.

But her four stars she saved for Sage's Cafe, 473 E. Broadway, the only Salt Lake restaurant to earn that honor.

"To get four stars, it had to be pretty extraordinary, something that I would talk about more than a month later," Mather said. "It's a full-scale vegan restaurant, but you could take your grandmother there, it's a nice place, with a homey feel, and the food is mostly organic," she said.

The four-star rating was great news to Ian Brandt, owner of Sage's Cafe.

"We were really excited to hear that. It was really special to be honored that way," said Brandt, who opened the restaurant the last week of 1999, "which is kind of unique because we think our food is the food for the new millennium."

In line with Brandt's ideals, the restaurant serves no animal products and uses food products that are both organic and "fair trade," where the company's workers are given fair wages and living conditions. Organic food costs twice as much, and there's about 20 percent more waste, since it contains no preservatives and thus spoils more quickly, he said.

"The only way we could afford the organic food is to add more gourmet characteristics to the cuisine, so we can charge a certain price," Brandt said.

Mather gave high marks to the carrot and macadamia nut butter, served with toasted seven-grain breadslices.

Another house favorite is the Philly Cheeze Steak — a nod to Brandt's hometown of Philadelphia. It has grilled onions, peppers and either portobello mushrooms or seitan, a wheat-based protein that mimics chicken. The "cheeze" is a nutritional yeast-based sauce.