Georges Perec, author of La Vie: Mode D’Emploi (Life: A User’s Manual), one of the few truly great, truly innovative postwar European works of fiction, once wrote a novel with no e’s in it. It was called La Disparition, it had a perfectly decent plot, a bubbly narrative character, and ran to fully 300 pages without once employing the commonest letter of all. Which was damnedly, damnedly clever. But I couldn’t finish it.

Nor could I finish Gilbert Adair’s possibly even cleverer English translation of it, A Void.

I had a bash, later, at Les Revenentes (this was back in my early twenties, when I still thought literature was the most important thing of all), in which Perec, in order, he said, to use up all the e’s he had saved by not using any in La Disparition, allowed himself only that vowel, and no other. And I tried Ian Monk’s brave English translation (The Exeter Text: Jewels, Secrets, Sex) too. And I finished neither. Indeed, I came out of them, as I had come out of the “e”-less efforts, barely able to read at all. Like when you emerge from a hard hour with The Times crossword and normal sentences no longer make sense, and for a few minutes every phrase you encounter in the real, unencrypted world (“mind the gap”, “only two schoolchildren at a time”, “five items or fewer”) seems to represent a satanic clue of some sort.

That’s the thing with lipogrammatic literature (in which the author imposes some sort of restraint or deprivation on himself, often to get the juices flowing when there is a creative blockage – a sort of creative sadomasochism): it can be incredibly impressive, but it can never have real soul. La Disparition is the best novel I have ever read which doesn’t have any e’s in it, but it isn’t nearly as good as any of the novels I have read which do.

These weird little novels came back to me last night when I was sitting in Saf, a restaurant that is not only vegan, but almost entirely raw (barely any cooking goes on, just a little blanching), and, halfway through the meal, the random (thankfully carnivorous) flopsy I had taken along for company said, “It’s all done very well, but it’s a bit like looking at a painting where the artist has only been allowed to use green and blue – the things in it still look like things, it’s just that it’s positively screaming out for some reds and yellows.”

Yup, exactly. Or some e’s. Literature is built on e’s, just as haute cuisine (to which, with its “botanical fine dining”, Saf clearly aspires) is built on meat. You can take them away and try to do it without them. And it is sort of possible. And people will no doubt clap politely. But they will not drool. Their hearts will not race. They will not weep.

I am not in any way hostile to vegetarianism or veganism. I am not one of those Shire Tory fatties who make jokes about “people who knit their own yoghurt” and chortle till they choke on their pork chop. I accept (up to a point) the neo-Malthusian projection which says that past a certain population point only non-livestock farming can sustain life on earth, and I accept totally the health benefits of a (mostly, but not entirely) vegetable diet.

I even accept that vegetarians (and even vegans) can be (although usually are not) great lovers of food. But I reserve the right to observe that, with the exception of those religiously or medically constrained to the meat-free or meat-and-dairy-free diet, they usually do not love themselves very much.

Like any food fad, vegetarianism (and veganism especially) is so often a smoke screen adopted to disguise a body-dysmorphic eating disorder. It is simply an excuse not to eat. And, indeed, Saf, which has done very well in the reviews, was positively rammed to the rafters, on a lazy Monday night in high summer, with very thin people, mostly women. (Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a complaint – better vegans than fat people.)

It’s a funky, warehousey, Shoreditchy sort of place (I saw at least two Hoxton fins, previously thought to have been extinct since 2002) with clean lines, a long, sexy bar, hard-edged, boxy tables and stools, and a restrained, rather minimalist outside space, with white walls and stripling bamboo whistling in the breeze.

The staff are kind and solicitous, and were quick to say that we should notify them of any allergies. Although I could not see anything on the menu of twiddled-up crudités to which one could possibly be allergic. Nuts, I suppose (from which Saf makes its “cheese”), and wheat, which is used only sparingly.

There was apparently only one non-vegetarian waitress (by far the healthiest-looking staff member), who, while insisting that she loved the food, suggested that we ate four starters, two mains and a couple of sides if we wanted to be full. She also said that she relished the nightly staff meal but that (unlike her vegetarian colleagues) she was usually starving hungry by the second half of her shift. Indeed, the staff here seemed an impossibly ascetic bunch – best exemplified by the wafer-thin, pale-faced young barman whom I spotted nipping outside at one point, for a crafty apple.

Times Recommends

• Top Ten most searched for recipes
• Chalet Chef 2010: the winning menus
• Gin and pomegranate jellies