Vegans, vegetarians, hipsters and even some adventurous meat-eaters have something to go a little nuts about. The much awaited “plant-based” burger patty, five years in the working and developed by Impossible Foods, a company dedicated to creating imitation meats, debuted at an NYC restaurant, Momofuku Nishi, on July 27.

The Impossible meat’s debut was at a restaurant that had once declared, “We do not serve vegetarian-friendly items here” – the first sign that this was a burger that meant business.

Priced at around $12 (around Rs 800) on the Momofuku Nishi menu, the burger is blowing minds, vegetarian and non-vegetarian alike, by how close it is to a New York cheese burger in taste and texture. The slightly pink middle of the patty oozes blood when cooked to a perfect medium-rare and crumbles in your mouth in a juicy, flavourful mess when bitten into, the sear on the patty a crunchy, fatty, salty affair associated with only meat.

New Yorkers lined up outside Momofuku Nishi on the day of the big reveal. By the end of the lunch hour, the Impossible burger had many converts tweeting and Instagramming about their experience. Many meat-eaters conceded that the patty indeed tasted meaty, if not "beefy".

The “magic ingredient” that enables the patty to exhibit beef like traits is called heme, an iron-rich molecule found in living cells. The Impossible Foods team uses plant heme protein which gives it a meaty flavour, along with a combination of several other plant-based ingredients.

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This is only the first in a long line of products that the Impossible Foods team is developing. Their motto? Save the planet!

According to the Impossible Foods website, “Substituting a quarter-pound Impossible Burger in place of one beef patty saves as much water as a 10-minute shower, takes 18 driving miles of greenhouse gas emissions off the road, and frees up 75 square feet of farmland”.