Reddit reviews The Chicago Diner Cookbook

Would you suggest the original 2002 or the new one 2013?

You obviously have more than enough individual suggestions already, so I'll just recommend three books instead in case you're a cookbook collector like me!

I'm also an omnivorous meat-eater but I'm happy to endorse these excellent, full-on vegan cookbooks by Isa Chandra Moskowitz:

Veganomicon. This is one of those comprehensive, encyclopedic things that could be—if you were a vegan—the only cookbook you own. It just covers everything, and I've never made anything from it that wasn't great. It's a manageable 336 pages, but they're dense; it's a book where every page has two or three recipes, not one where every dish gets a photo. Highly recommended.

Isa Does It. So this is like the sandwich-shop version of Veganomicon. Isa Does It (get it?) is vegan on easy-mode: here are sloppy joes and mac and cheese and, generally, all the casual vegan meals you could ever eat. Vegans over at /r/mealprepsundays should mass-produce burger patties from it. Not recommended quite as highly, but highly recommended for what it is.

Isa is just a really good cook, so her flavors and vegetable & grain choices have always been on point for me. My favorite thing about her writing, and what keeps me coming back to her as a meat-eater, is that she's never interested in creating meat substitutes. The vegetables are the point, after all, so she's making dishes where the vegetables are the showstopper. When she makes a burger it always feels just a little halfhearted compared to her rock-star vegetable dishes, which is why "Isa Does It" falls just short of "Veganomicon" for me. But it's still great.

For a really great chef who does somersaults to simulate meat dishes—burgers and chili and Thanksgiving turkey—it is well worth your while to pick up The Chicago Diner Cookbook by Jo Kaucher. I could tell stories about some large-scale orphan Thanksgivings I've helped to host, where we served a hundred people over two days with meat and vegan options flying everywhere. We practically scripted the vegetarian (vegan) half of these meals from the Diner cookbook. Here is what I know: a ton of starving Chicago artists of varying omnivore, vegetarian and vegan status absolutely destroyed Jo Kaucher's tofurkey year after year after year, while my SO's actual-turkey, which is damned fucking good, always took second place and became leftovers. Shit, I prefer Jo's tofurkey to real turkey and I'm the kind of guy who makes laap from scratch at home, which means I'll spend an hour mincing intestines on a cutting board that you wet with pig blood while you chop. That is, I don't go out of my way for tofu and still I adore Jo's tofurkey.

Anyway, I hope those are fun suggestions that might be useful. :)