The Vegetarian Festival is already drawing to a close. Traffic heading toward Chinatown, especially during the last two or three evenings, has been formidable enough to encourage celebrants with limited reserves of patience to take a stab at preparing this special, meatless cuisine at home. But Ung-aang Talay, being a creature of habit, made a couple of trips to the Yaowaraj-Charoen Krung area, where the festival is at its best in Bangkok, to see what kinds of jay fare was being offered this year.

Generally speaking, the dishes served to U-a T and friends this time were a slight letdown. The jay culinary tradition, which eschews not only meat and animal products, but also vegetables like garlic that are thought to have heating properties, is not strong on aggressively hot and spicy dishes. But this year there was a trend toward what struck Ung-aang Talay and friends as excessive blandness and lack of character.

This was especially true in restaurants who had substituted vegetarian cooking for the meat and fish dishes usually listed on their menus. Last Tuesday evening, U-a T and a group of six friends descended upon one extremely busy shop near Wat Leng Nuy Yee on Charoen Krung Road and ordered a stack of dishes so imposing that it practically amounted to "one of each".

Servings of het pao hue phad phed (spicy fried oyster mushrooms), which included fragrant khrueang kaeng and fresh green peppercorns, and those wonderful stewed or fried green vegetable dishes like bai paw were as good as ever. The hed hawm (Chinese black mushrooms) stewed in fake vegetarian oyster sauce were all anyone could ask. But delectable looking haw moke topped with thick coconut cream, and a rich-looking "kaeng khiao waan kai", made with artificial, soya-based "chicken", were real disappointments. Last year both of these items tasted just as delicious as they looked, with a spicy bite and a mouthwatering herbal aroma. This year they were almost completely tasteless.

Two evening later, Ung-aang Talay made another visit to the area, and stopped in a nearby shop that seemed to specialise in familiar dishes made with vegetable gluten substituted for chicken, duck, etc. There were also an array of offerings that made no attempt to disguise themselves as meat, and as always, these were the best ones.

U-a T and friends were especially impressed by a combination stewed black mushroom and chestnut combination, and by a very successful stewed cabbage dish, once again scented by hed hawm that had been added in generous quantities (if you don't like Chinese black mushrooms, you'd probably better forget about this festival). But once again the "meat" dishes were unexciting, oily and less flavourful than Ung-aang Talay remembers every having tasted them before.

Out on the street, the news was better. There is a whole repertoire of vegetarian sweets and snacks that are on sale all over Chinatown during the Vegetarian Festival, but some of which require a lot of tracking down during the rest of the year. One personal favourite is hed suwan, which uses shredded hed pao hue (oyster mushrooms) instead of beef to make the popular sweet-salty snack.

The oyster mushrooms are shredded, then partially dried, then fried until crisp, and finally mixed with palm sugar, salt, and sesame seeds to create a powerfully addictive munchie. This year there are great stacks of it on sale all over Chinatown. Those sampled by Ung-aang Talay were of generally uniform quality.

Also highly recommended is the nam phrik phao hed hawm, a vegetarian version of nam phrik phao pepper sauce that, once again, relies on Chinese mushrooms to provide substance. Recently this has become easily available all year round from a number of sources, the Royal Project and certain vegetarian restaurants. Still, some of the shops around Yaowaraj are good places to obtain the sauce if you want it in large quantities.

But get moving. Monday is the last day of the festival.