If you've just turned vegan and are apprehensive about dining in restaurants, the advice here should help you.

Go to restaurants that not 100% vegan at quieter times

Lots of restaurants that are not entirely vegan still have plenty of menu items that are suitable for vegans to eat. However, when ordering at these restaurants, you may have to spend more time chatting to the waiter or waitress, to find out if, for example, certain items that appear to be vegan are cooked in the same frying pan as meat-dishes (in which case they're not technically 100% vegan) or whether the chef would be able to replace some ingredients in a non-vegan dish that appeals to you, to make it vegan.

Whilst the wait staff at any decent restaurant will be happy to answer your questions and will try their best to accommodate the changes you ask them to make to the menu items, the conversation might feel a bit rushed if you have it when the restaurant is packed and each of the wait staff is simultaneously handling the orders of half a dozen tables. In this situation, your nervousness about bothering the wait staff, coupled with their busyness, might result in you not wanting to ask too many questions or actually forgetting to ask certain vegan-related questions. This might lead to you receiving a meal that you are not absolutely certain is vegan.

Conversely, if you go to a restaurant when it's normally quiet, the wait staff will have plenty of time to discuss the menu and you can enquire about all of their vegan (or potentially vegan) dishes, without feeling pressured to hurry up so they can serve their other customers. Once you have done this a few times at a particular restaurant, you'll know which dishes you can order and which ones you can only order if your ask for some non-vegan ingredients to be replaced, and you can then go to the restaurant's at its busiest time if you want to.

Stick with a restaurant's simplest vegan-friendly meals if you have to go to a new, busy restaurant

If you're asked to join some friends for a last-minute meal at a busy restaurant you're unfamiliar with and you don't want to come across as difficult in front of your pals, by asking a long series of questions about the restaurant's vegan options, then the best thing to do is to opt for a simple meal that is obviously vegan so that you can order with ease.

For example, a basic dish of some starch (like pasta, beans, rice, or potato), served with a non-creamy sauce that's has a base of tomatoes and a few other vegetables that have been fried in oil, rather than lard, is a safe and easy vegan dish that you'll enjoy and feel satiated by but won't take long to order.