Vegan Garden is the latest project of the owners of Moonlight Garden, another favorite vegetarian (though not strictly: meat dishes are served there too) spot. As I am a veteran of Bamboo Garden in Lower Queen Anne (oily meat substitutes so delicious you have to eat them all + big, sweet, strong drinks = well, you know), my interest was not immediately piqued. How many kosher-vegan-pan-Asian joints can one city carry ... even a kosher, vegan, pan-Asian city like Seattle? I piqued up a little at the chance to write a little review of the place, though, because we write to find out what we are writing about, and I wanted to know something about the dish Bamboo- and Vegan- Garden goers know as General Tso's "chicken."

The mysteries: who is the eponymous General Tso and how does a military man rise to such a level of proficiency in creating tangy sauces suitable for chicken or its soy-based substitutes? How is it possible for a tangible, earthly object to taste so good without breaking any laws of physics? Why do so many vegan restaurants follow the naming convention "_______ Garden?" And finally, why does the aforementioned mock "chicken" always come in the shape of slightly oblong spheroids ... i.e. balls?

For the sake of readability, let's just assume I've already made every clever joke about that particular aspect of the dish and move on. Also, it should be noted here that I do not intend to solve the aforementioned mysteries. I was just initiating a dialog.

For ages, the lowdown in Seattle's hip vegan circles has been that #87, General Tso's Chicken, is the must-have item on Bamboo Garden's menu. I'm not sure if it's the spicy, syrupy, multi-purpose sauce (seriously, no difference between "hot" and "mild") or the flaky-crusted, chewy-centered balls of what appears to be soy protein that sub in for the chicken, but there is something about the simple dish that makes it more than the sum of its parts. I wanted to see if the same was true at Vegan Garden, which I knew also offered the hungry traveler a heaping pile of sweet, saucy balls (OK, last time, I promise). I enlisted a dining companion, hereafter known as Dining Companion, and went to check it out.

General Tso (aka Zuo Zongtáng, aka General Gao), born 1812, was a civil servant and military officer who began his illustrious career by failing the civil exam seven times. I used to administer exams like this here in our own time and country, and if they are anything alike, it goes to show that Gen. Tso was not, as they say, high-functioning. Tso retired - I wasn't aware that retiring was an option in your twenties - and took up the simple, country life. It wasn't until the Taipei rebellion that he rose to prominence and became known for his military prowess. For the rest of his life, Tso was a soldier, and was appointed to the Grand Council in 1880. OK, so obviously when I looked all this up on Wikipedia I learned a lot about Tso, as well as some interesting minutiae about Star Trek and minor characters on The Simpsons, but there's one problem.

None of this has to do with chicken. When and where did this triumphant warrior's name become connected with the eponymous dish of mangled poultry in a savory sauce, usually served over broccoli?

Dining Companion and I drove up to the Garden. I was determined to find answers. And, I was hungry.

Parking is available at Vegan Garden, though the lot is small and shared by several other businesses. The stalls reserved for the restaurant are labeled "Vegan," which made me feel like a rock star or at least an employee of the month. The decor is, well, pretty much decor. The seating area is large and L-shaped, not highly decorated. The place is clean, bright, and comfortable. Dining Companion noted that the table was a little sticky, but she's a big whiner anyway.

We are at the Garden early and the place was nearly empty. As we ate, the dinner crowd from the football game trickled in. A vegan dinner crowd from a football game? Still, the place didn't get overly full, and the waiters were courteous and helpful without seeming aggressive. I don't like stalker-waiters, except at Ballet Restaurant where they're cute.

Now, the food. It is still somewhat of a novelty for me to be paid for my writing, compensated for the cost of the food I'm reviewing. It doesn't really make sense to me, but neither does paying for my own food. Ordering on someone else's tab, we got summer rolls as appetizers, an order of some kind of stir fried noodle and vegetable thing, and, of course, the General's finest. We planned on dessert, too.

The summer rolls were excellent, stuffed with fresh greens and that fried, dried up tofu which crunches kind of like bacon bits - you know what I mean. Dining Companion tried her noodly stir fry and proclaimed it good; it was a little heavy, but it tasted like it should have, if it could be said that anything should taste like anything.

And then there were the balls. Slightly smaller than those at Bamboo, and lacking their counterparts' flaky crust, the "chicken" balls that made up the majority of the dish were dense, saturated in sauce, and absolutely fun to stuff in your mouth. Longtime "heads" know there aren't many psychoactive substances that are truly addictive, in the strict sense, but there are many things in the world that provoke obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviors in otherwise normal people. General Tso's balls are one of them. I have seen fights break out across tables, spilling out into aisles, and out the door for a cigarette, simply because an odd number of diners had the misfortune of drawing an even number of balls. The balls at Vegan Garden are perhaps more dangerous than those at Bamboo, because they are leaner and lighter in the stomach; I can envision a Bukowskiesque "bring me another" situation in which an unwitting diner, unfamiliar with the General and his clever traps, takes on more than he is capable of and ends up with a severely damaged digestive system and, quite possibly, psyche. Still trying to force that last little globe, dripping with sauce, into his mouth ...

No one knows how or when Tso's name became associated with the dish. Hailing from the province of Hunan, Tso would have been familiar with thick, savory sauces, not the sweet and tangy goop that normally coats a big plate of balls here in the states. Apparently the dish was invented by refugees from the Chinese civil war in Taiwan and was first served in New York, perhaps in the late '50s, by a chef named Peng Chang-kuei. But enough with the names ... neither you nor I knew who General Tso was at the beginning of this thing and maybe we still don't. Immortality is an impossible project. If you're even hoping to make your name last, forget success, fame, wealth, art ... better get some food named after you, and fast.

We finished off with a piece of vegan chocolate cake, which was, as far as vegan cakes go, perfect. There was only a hint of that weird dense, dry texture that most no-egg baked goods seem to share. This was a serious vegan cake, and we had it with a nondairy ice cream on the side, which Dining Companion, who is a connoisseur of these things, informed me was Soy Dream. I ate the fortune cookie without thinking, but it turns out that at Vegan Garden the prophetic little delicacies really are vegan, unlike those at another Garden I know of (I'm told Bamboo has difficulty sourcing kosher vegan fortune cookies; not sure if Vegan Garden is 100% kosher). My fortune was something about enduring pain and becoming enlightened, so I chucked it, because both of those things sounded difficult.

We got out of there for under forty bucks, including appetizers, food, desserts, and tip. Not bad, even with someone else's money. But the mystery remained. The world may never know how General Tso found his good name entwined with a chicken dish he likely never ate or heard of, that later carried over to the spicy, chewy, protein golfballs served by the premier vegan restaurants of Seattle. But here is what I think about the good General and his chicken: when called upon, Tso turned around a proven record of failure and triumphed. Sort of. Like veganism as a cultural concept, he was a late bloomer. And now Tso is a household name, but only due to something entirely ancillary to what he would have considered his greatest accomplishments. I see some parallels to my own life. Will there one day be a Bob Oswald's canned-beans-and-leftover-spinach? And hey, why are they always ball shaped? Some questions cannot be answered; some mysteries beget only more mysteries.