From Michelin-starred restaurants to camp cookouts and pop-up dinners in sewer tunnels (yes, this is really a thing), there is no denying that the encounter with food is just as important as eating it.

Hence this contradiction in terms: the vegan meat-lovers pizza.

“It’s about having that authentic experience,” says vegan chef Jen Bundock of the consummate herbivore’s dilemma: the desire to eat typical, North American cuisine, but roadblocked by dietary restrictions.

“It’s about being able to walk into a restaurant and blend in.”

And also to come face to face with food that looks, smells and tastes familiar.

That’s the premise behind Bundocks’s vegan pizza and snack bar Apiecalypse Now! and its Pig Destroyer Destroyer ($18 for a 12-inch pie) — a vegan pie so “obnoxiously meaty,” she says, she had to throw on some artichoke hearts in order to manage customers’ expectations.

“People find it too weird when there aren’t any ‘veggies’ on it,” she says, with a smirk.

Whether or not it’s because of the artichokes, customers to the Bloor St. store are eager to consume it. Vegans especially, Bundock says, but also carnivores who visit with vegan friends or wander in off the street.

Sometimes, they’re angry they’ve stumbled into a vegan joint (the restaurant’s lack of animal flesh is not apparent in the decor). But, says Bundock, she meets foul moods with a proposition: she’ll hand back their dough if they’re not satisfied.

To date, she’s never had to return any money, she says.

Named cheekily after the Pig Destroyer, a carnivorous pizza at Sizzle Pie, a popular pizzeria in Portland, Oregon, Bundock’s vegan version destroys that one, she says, by trouncing its three kinds of real meat with five kinds of faux meat.

Onto her house-made vegan dough, Bundock piles “not chicken,” seitan chorizo, which she calls “seitanrizo,” “pepperphony,” bacon bits (because we all know there’s never been any real bacon in them) and barbecue-sauce-smothered soy curls you’d swear was slow-roasted pork.

Bundock makes this umami-rich fake pig by rehydrating crisps of soy curls in seasoned water, then dousing them with homemade barbecue sauce infused with hickory smoke — the one ingredient she swears is the real draw to meat.

She can live without meat, she says, “but not without hickory smoke!”

Bundock garnishes the pizza with shreds of Daiya cheese. Just enough to melt into the dough’s crevices and pile, like snowy caps, onto the mountains of fake meat.

She finishes it off with shards of smoked, fake Gouda.

The baked pizza smells like a meat lovers feast. And looks it, too. The melted Daiya stretches like mozzarella as Bundock pulls away a hot slice.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

One bite — and you’d swear you’ve got a mouthful of pork in many of its glorious forms. This pie is spicy, smoky and completely meaty.

Bundock knows it. That’s why she made it, she says, because “nobody goes vegan because they don’t like the taste of meat.”

Got an idea for Sourced? E mail mhenry@thestar.ca

Correction - November 26 2015: This article was edited from a previous version that misstated Jen Bundock's given name.