So much so that vegetable offerings on restaurant menus nationally have jumped 11% over the past three years, reports Technomic, the restaurant research specialist. Chief among them is kale, the ...

Picture of the roasted beet salad, a dish from chef Gregory Short's vegetable menu at Masa's restaurant in San Francisco, Calif., on Wednesday, May 20, 2009.

Similarly, the National Restaurant Association cited heirloom vegetables among the top 10 food trends it predicts customers will be seeing on menus in the coming year.

”We have people that come in that are 100 percent vegan and we love them, and then we have people that come in that aren’t even vegetarian at all and maybe came for the first time as a gag ...