It was the same in China, where vegetarian cooking meant the use of gluten and other soy-based products to imitate “pork”, “fish”, “chicken” and what-have-you.
Once, back in 2000, I was in Beijing on a 7-week assignment. On the final week, my boss from Germany flew in to meet the senior management of our Beijing office. I told the China chief financial officer, who was arranging a posh dinner on our last evening, that my boss was vegetarian. He was taken back for a while, then quickly recovered and decided that we shall have the formal dinner at Gong De Lin, Beijing’s oldest vegetarian restaurant - founded 1922.
I reassured my German boss, then on his first-ever visit to China, that the banquet on the final evening was going to be 100% vegetarian.
I think we BOTH had a shock when we saw the dinner spread at Gong De Lin that evening, ranging from a whole “Peking duck”, carved table-side and served with pancakes and condiments like the real thing; Xinjiang-style “mutton kebabs” (I swore when I burped 3 hours later back in my hotel room, it was mutton breath!), a whole braised sweet-and-sour “fish” , etc. Halfway through the vegetarian banquet, my German boss whispered to me, “Nothing on the table is even green!”. 
