Vegetarian Seafood in Boca Raton: Meat-Free Dishes at the City's Seafood Restaurants

City Fish Market

A big, polished seafood house on Glades Road in west Boca, built around a fresh-catch counter where you choose the fish and how it is cooked, with lake views from the enclosed sun porches. The kitchen is built around fish, so a vegetarian is working from the salads and the a la carte side list: steamed broccoli, sauteed baby leaf spinach, a vegetable medley and a basil potato. Reviewers are warmer about the room and the happy hour than about the value, and its aggregate score is the lowest of the ten restaurants here. Worth it for the setting and the company rather than for the plant-based cooking.

Chops Lobster Bar

The dressiest room on this list: a Mizner Park steakhouse and lobster bar with a live-lobster tank, dry-aged beef and A5 wagyu, and prices to match. There is no vegetarian main course anywhere on the dinner menu, so the meat-free meal here is the Chops Chopped Salad of hearts of palm and chickpeas plus the sharing sides, which are genuinely good: broccolini with garlic and chilli, steamed jumbo asparagus, lightly creamed baby leaf spinach, truffle parmesan fries. Best understood as somewhere you go with a group and assemble a plate, not somewhere the kitchen has cooked for you.

Eddie V's Prime Seafood

Fine dining in Mizner Park with live jazz in the lounge most nights, and the highest-rated of the expensive rooms here. Like the other prime-seafood houses it has no vegetarian entree, but its Accompaniments list is the strongest of the group: truffled macaroni and cheese made with French black truffles, grilled asparagus with lemon and sea salt, au gratin cheddar potatoes, sauteed sweet corn. Order two or three of those with a Caesar and you have a real dinner. It takes reservations and the dining room runs late, which makes it the easiest of the fine-dining options for a mixed table.

Luff's Fish House

A 1920s bungalow on East Palmetto Park Road done up like Key West, with covered gazebos outside and a fish market attached. The mains are fish, ribs or steak, but the salads section stands on its own: a knife-and-fork Greek salad, a Backyard Salad of mixed greens and avocado, and a Southwest Salad with black beans, corn, avocado and queso fresco. Cheerful and mid-priced, the least formal sit-down room on this list, and the one where a vegetarian and a fish eater can both order comfortably without booking weeks ahead.

Ke'e Grill

A dark, clubby steak-and-seafood grill up on Military Trail that Boca has been going to for more than two decades, and one of the harder tables to get on short notice. The meat-free options are the salads, including a vine-ripe tomato and sweet onion salad with crumbled blue cheese, and the side dishes that come two to an entree: Spinach Maria, Provencale Pasta and basmati rice. Nothing on the entree list is vegetarian, so expect to build a plate from those sides. Reviewers rate the food and the service well above the room.

Chili Crab

The best vegetarian showing on this list, and the one place here where a vegetarian orders from the same part of the menu as everyone else. It is a Singaporean and Hong Kong seafood kitchen on North Dixie Highway whose signature is a whole chilli crab shown to the table alive before it is cooked, but the menu carries a full Vegetable section: a meat-free Ma Po Tofu, braised tofu with vegetables, bok choy with garlic, snow pea shoots, gai lan in ginger sauce, plus a Vegetarian Shanghai Noodle and a vegetarian hot and sour soup. Everything comes as sharing plates, which is what makes a mixed table work here. Its aggregate rating is modest for the list; the vegetarian range is not.

Lemongrass Asian Bistro Sushi

A busy pan-Asian room in Mizner Park with a full sushi bar, Thai curries and dim sum alongside the raw fish. Its Side Veggies list reads like a small-plates menu in its own right, with charred garlic broccolini, wok-charred bok choy, yuzu ponzu asparagus and spicy eggplant, and the sushi bar turns out a Veggie Veggie Roll, a kappa and an avocado roll. At lunch there is a Buddha Delight of steamed tofu, bok choy, snow peas and shiitake. The dinner entree list is meat and fish only, so a vegetarian eats small plates and rolls here rather than a single main.

SUSHIGO

The highest-rated restaurant on this list, a small Federal Highway sushi bar where the chef has been making sushi for over twenty years and the fish list runs to bluefin toro, uni and Japanese madai. The vegetarian standout is the Protein Vege Roll, which wraps kale, radish, avocado, carrot and cucumber in soybean paper with a creamy yuba sauce and no rice at all. Around it sit crunchy fried silken tofu, edamame, Japanese pickled radish, and inari, avocado and kampyo nigiri. Prices are high for a strip-mall sushi bar, and the room is small enough that booking is sensible.

Yakitori Sake House

A Japanese izakaya in Royal Palm Plaza, a few minutes' walk from Mizner Park, built around robata skewers, sushi and a deep sake list, with an outdoor seating area and a daily 3pm to 6pm happy hour. Its clearest full vegetarian plate is the hibachi fried rice with vegetables on the Asian lunch menu; at happy hour there is a veggie roll, crispy baby bok choy, edamame and a vegetable gyoza. Diners describe the kitchen as accommodating for vegetarian requests. The full dinner menu is not published as readable text online, so it is worth asking about evening vegetarian dishes when you book.

Bonefish Grill

The chain option, out on Glades Road in west Boca, and the one on this list you can usually walk into. It is reliable rather than exciting, and a vegetarian is choosing from the Premium Sides list, where grilled asparagus, roasted new potatoes and truffle fries all cost the same, plus the house and Caesar salads from the Soups and Greens section. Those sides are the cheapest meat-free plates in this comparison by a wide margin, which is the main reason to consider it. Its published prices are the online-ordering ones, so expect the dining-room bill to differ a little.