Dubrovnik Vegan Scene: Moskar Konoba Restaurant

*This post is part of a series in which I eat fancy Michelin-starred meals and then brag about it. 

When we spent a weekend in Madrid this year, Husband surprised me with a reservation for lunch at Ramon Freixa, a restaurant with two (2!) Michelin stars. This was obviously very exciting, although the place is not well-known for its vegan-friendliness. Husband contacted all the best restaurants in Madrid to see who could accommodate vegans the most, and Ramon’s assurances were the most persuasive and promising. And if they didn’t do a good job, at least I could publicly shame them on my blog. Happily, we are doing zero shaming today! (At least on the blog.) Ramon Freixa presented me with a delightful, seemingly endless vegan ‘lunch’ (it lasted well into the evening).

   Before we get to the food, let’s talk about the restaurant itself. We were brought to a heated covered patio sort of thing, like a sun room, to wait for our table. We had one of the first reservations of the day and we were a little early so we sat in the lovely little sun room that would have been so much lovelier if it wasn’t January. a few businessmen-type people were doing business at a nearby table. Soon we were led inside, and the restaurant was so clean and shiny and pretty and I realized, erma p, I am quite underdressed. Although I haven’t written in it in a really long time, I do indeed have a Style section on this website. I like to think that I have at least decent taste (and those of you remembering my law school backpack can shove it). So, I am embarrassed to say that the one and only time I believe I was ever, ever underdressed was for this lunch!! Que c’est embarrassant! 

My favorite thing right off the bat was that, before I could put my (favorite Matt & Nat!) purse on the floor, a staff member literally swept in and placed a metal stool next to my chair for that purpose. I mean. Come on. A seat for my bag? Where am I? This is awesome! I knew then that my napkin would be folded into a swan or elephant every time I went to the bathroom, and that I did not have to worry about my water refills. It’s that kind of place. 

   Unfortunately for you, the printed menu they gave us is poorly translated and poorly edited of the non-vegan items. I’ll do the best I can to describe things and remember what the crap they were, but I’ll tell you right now, I don’t remember any details. Spoiler: I’m also sharing two pictures of non-vegan foods (the butter dish and a small cheese) because they were the most adorable and awesome-looking things ever, and you can’t really tell what they are anyway. 
   The first few dishes were already on our table when we were seated, which I very much enjoyed. According to the menu, we have seaweed crackers, “cold and hot citric”, and “the strawberry that wanted to become tomato”, the latter of which is the name of a book or movie or song I’m going to write; I don’t care what it is I need to use that name. The crackers were self-explanatory, nothing special. But the other two components set the bar extremely high for the rest of the meal, at least creativity-wise. The cold and hot citric was a really citrus sorbet but with hot citrus juice poured on top, so it was frozen yet hot and foaming while you ate it. It was delicious, but more than that, it was awesome. Our poor little strawberry friend was a huge surprise, because it looked like a strawberry, little seed dots and all, but it was indeed a tomato. A perfect raw tomato that had somehow been manipulated to look like a strawberry AND to not taste like the usual (gross) raw tomatoes. So cool!

     Next, we were brought small bread rolls that we got to choose from an enormous and varied basket (yay and I wanted all of them). I was given a little dish of some of the greatest olive oil ever, while Husband was given a hockey puck and a rock. I kid you not. A hockey puck and a rock. He called over a waiter and asked, “Um…so…what do I do with these objects?” Judging from past experience, we assumed the rock was very very hot and that it was a cooking stone for an ingredient to be presented (this is actually based on past experience, not joking). But the waiter showed us that the hockey puck was actually a butter dish (the butter was the middle) and the rock was a soft piece of cheese that happened to have a slate grey shell formed around it. I mean, I was cracking up. My favorite things that I never ate and don’t want anyone to eat! 

    After being served basket bread, it turned out that our next real dish was more bread! Yay! Well, it was a crispbread, luckily, because we got basket bread multiple times. (Michelin restaurants in Spain give bread! Who knew!) The cracker was doused in amazing olive oil and salt, and topped with delicious tomatoes and tomato pulp. I don’t usually get excited about raw tomatoes, but this was so so great. Like the cracker version of the best bruschetta ever. 
   The next two small plates are mysteries. They were both good, one incredible and one fine, but I’m just not sure what they were. I think the fantastic one was a lentil cracker with some kind of cheesy root vegetable and crispy things on top. It was such a lovely little bite I could have had 100 of them. It was also served upon a white ceramic tree stump. Hot damn I love the stuff fancy restaurants use. The fine one I think was chia seeds; the menu says ‘veggy roe’ which is pretty accurate for chia pudding actually. It had chopped carrot or winter squash in there and some seaweed. 

    The following dish was actually a dish (huge news!), on a dish, and was a little miracle. Not kidding, this plate I think was my favorite, one of the best parts of the meal. It included ‘steamed truffle made of truffle’ and ‘vanilla souffle potatoes’. Let’s start with the truffle made of truffle. It was perfect black truffle whipped into a truffle shape. I have never had real truffles before, aside from an odd dash of lower-quality truffle oil at some places, so it was pretty awesome to have my first legit truffle be an enormous glob of the good stuff. And I mean enormous. It was probably too much for the dish, and I’m sure other people would have had trouble finishing the insanely rich delicacy, but I loved it. Erma. I’m such a convert to truffles now. Not that I have ever bought anything truffle or had any since. 

That’s a lot of super rich truffle! It was so so good. Anyone who thinks truffles are so over are crazy. And they sound pretentious. Now I’m cracking up hearing Louis CK do his pretentious white girl voice saying “truffles are soo ooover.” Anyway, that wasn’t even the best part of this plate. That lone slice of potato that looks kind of sad, the one wearing the hat? was the most incredible, creative, and surprisingly delicious part of this whole meal. When they told us it was a vanilla potato, we were like…umm…that’s going to be gross. A for creativity and trying to be unique, but what? No, we were very wrong. It was spectacular! Purely vanilla, but still proper to be eating with savory food. So incredible! Here’s a close-up so you can see the vanilla bean goodness. 
     After such rich food, I was grateful that the next dish was lighter and healthier, although it did taste healthier to if you know what I mean. This was a bean log, made of pureed white beans, rolled in broccoli dust, with shaved raw truffles at the ends. (Raw truffles do not taste like whipped awesome truffles.) This did taste a little like plain beans and raw broccoli, but I am vegan so I really enjoyed it. 

   

   Ah but next up was another rich dish! Well, a rich and crazy soup, really, or tea…or coffee. On the menu, it is called ‘from tea to cappuccino’, and it was another mind-boggling creation. A cup of hot mushroom broth was topped with a thick salted celery foam that I’m pretty sure is responsible for one of the Michelin stars. Celery foam! After you got through the ‘cappuccino’ foam, you got to the mushroom ‘tea’. Incredible little cup of wonder!

    As expected with a restaurant that isn’t primarily vegan-focused, one of my ‘main’ dishes was grilled vegetables. But, it was pretty wonderful! There was a small cauliflower steak, perfectly oily mushrooms, asparagus tips, pearl onions, Brussels sprouts, tiny whole carrots, and a wonderful rich sauce underneath it all. This dish was described in the menu as being ‘like an animated forest’. I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s awesome. 

  By now you probably realize, whew, this is a lot of food, we must be getting near dessert, right? And you said this was lunch?! Nope, two more savory courses to go! Luckily, even though I was quite (QUITE) full, the next two plates were some of my favorite things ever. First off, we got tofu! It was sooo goood. And so surprising! They must work with tofu regularly because otherwise I just don’t know how they made this so well. It tasted like it was marinated in soy sauce, and it was really firm and incredibly smooth (not grainy), which I rarely find in tofu regardless of the source. The tofu sat on a bed of fresh peas, and it was all seasoned so lightly but so well. So cool! 

    We ended the savory food section on a high note, with a tiny hot soup of fresh peas and..a grain? topped with grilled radicchio. This was so perfect, I wish I could recreate it to have for dinner on a cold winter’s night. Or a cold summer night; I am in London still wearing longs and longs in July.  

    After such an impressive array of food, it was only natural that the desserts wouldn’t be able to reach the same high levels. They did a remarkable job with the food, for a restaurant that doesn’t usually serve vegans, but dessert is harder for most places. I got two beautiful if simple fruit dishes, one that came with a poof of Smurf hair cotton candy. Pretty fun! 

   All in all, it was a splendid meal, and definitely recommended if you are looking for a duper fancy restaurant in Madrid. I think I’m still full from it. 

RAMON FREIXA, MADRID, SPAIN
Water speed: Total bosses! I think there was a waiter who was solely responsible for watering me. 
Service: See above. Pretty great. 
Bathrooms: Omg the bathrooms were so funny. The restaurant decor was all golds and whites and silvers, very simple chic, and then the bathroom was like neon yellow and futuristic plastic stuff, so funny. There were incredibly fancy soaps and lotions too; I considered pulling a ‘Broad City’ and filling up a plastic bag with them. 
Food: Really wonderful overall. Some dishes were basic but the average was brought up pretty high due to some standouts. 
Bonus: Pretty sure we were dining with the richest Japanese businessmen planning coups and stuff. Also people were wearing hilarious dinner jackets. Like hilarious. 

   There’s an exciting new pop-up to look out for, London! The Vegan Nigerian, a.k.a. Tomi Makanjuola, held her first vegan pop-up dinner last night at La Suite West Hotel in Bayswater, a.k.a. west AF but worth it, and with any luck it’ll be the first of many such events, if not the prequel to a café or restaurant, although pop-ups do have the benefit of seeming so cool and exclusive and everyone knows I like to pretend I’m cool. This meal had some kinks to work out, and there is room for improvement, but it showed so much potential for the future and I can’t wait to eat more.

   The dinner was held at La Suite West’s restaurant called Raw, a vegan-friendly place where I believe Tomi is a chef and they have a vegan English breakfast (the food not tea) that rightly doesn’t cost more than the non-vegan ones and so a trip there is in order. It was nice to have the fancy space available for this and not be in someone’s living room; it made it all seem very professional. A hilarious waitress came around with water and spilled mine and then told us how nervous she was, and we immediately said let’s all be friends since we’re clearly kindred spirits. A great start (not sarcasm). Then boxes of mango and pineapple juice were brought to our table (but no additional glasses; maybe they expected people to choose between water or juice, and like hell if I’m gonna ever limit my liquids!) which was kind of adorable. The wait for the first course was somewhat long, so having whole boxes of juice per table really helped the time pass/contribute to a terrible sugar rush.

   For the first course, you had to choose between the vegetable peppersoup and the okra and sweet potato salad. Me, being dumb, I thought “Oh I’ve had vegetable soup for dinner for like 3 nights in a row, who would want it again” and got the salad. It was fine, but I tried my friend’s soup and it was SPECTAC. So I chose wrongly and I’ll never forget the regret. ​No just kidding, the salad was fine, a little misleading as it was mostly warm sweet potato chunks with very nicely seasoned okra. Two foods I love, and the okra was really good, but it was mostly sweet potato, and pretty plain at that. Like a whole big steamed sweet potato cut up on a plate with some okra. I may have just gotten unlucky with my plating favoring the potato more than okra and maybe others had a more balanced mix. It was fine, but that much sweet potato needed a sauce or a marinade maybe. Or just lesser amounts. Fine, though. ​

​     But that soup was really fantastic, a stand-out. The first thing I thought was that I need to find out how to make it because I want it for my next possible dinner, and I want a lot of it and I don’t want to have to steal it from my friend. It was a clear broth, which was unexpected (you hear pepper soup, you think like pureed red pepper or something (gross), but the one-word version of peppersoup tells you otherwise or something), with a mix of some chopped soup vegetables in there (potato and zucchini I think I saw? I don’t know I didn’t eat it), and then the whole thing was freaking doused in pepper, so much that it burned my throat going down, and chili pepper I assume, and of course other spices and yes I need to do some serious research before I try to make it myself, and anyway it was glorious. I feel like even though it burned so much, people who don’t really like spicy food would still enjoy it because the flavor was so sophisticated and interesting. Or maybe that’s a dumb thing to say, but it’s also dumb not to like spicy food. I’m really joking. I really can’t believe how much I’m going on about a freaking vegetable soup like I’ve lost my mind but my goodness, it was so good.

​       We also got a little basket of bread and the bread was good. I can say bread in Russian now. In semester 2 of this $!*(#)&$%^(!#*) language and I can say bread, at least.

        Choice was over after this course, which I appreciated, having made the wrong choice so early in the game and having lost all confidence in my ability to choose from that point on. Don’t know how I’m going to get dressed tomorrow. The main course was coconut rice with efo riro, or spinach stew, with baked plantain. I tried to make coconut rice once from a recipe online. It used a lot of full fat coconut milk, and so might have been good for a rice pudding, but it was too sweet for me for savory food. Because of this bad experience, I was hesitant about the pairing here. Of course, this being a professional chef, the coconut rice was just subtle enough to tell something cool was going on and formed a great complement to the stew. I would have liked more stew to balance the stew-to-rice ratio (my plate was clean when I finished, no traces of sauce, which seems odd when you’ve just eaten a stew), but what we had was very nice. You know how most spinach stews, or curries for the most part, feel very heavy in their spice profile, like everything is dark and deep and low on the chart of some unknown quality, like just totally warm but heavy? I don’t know but anyway, this one somehow felt bright, which was really cool. It had all the interesting warmth you want from a stew yet accomplished it without the heavy tones. The plate was encircled by smears of a delicious and thick red pepper sauce, a great addition to the mix. And then the baked plantain slices were placed on top. Plantains are great, and although these seemed a little dry from what I’m used to (probably because they were baked not fried), they were still plantains, so, good. In a nice gesture from the kitchen, the kind that makes people happy because everyone likes free unexpected stuff, we also got an extra bowl of plantains for the table which I think I had more than my share of, sorry tablemates. 

        By this point I think we were already two hours into the dinner, which is extremely slow. I have a feeling the waitstaff just comprised friends of the chef who volunteered, and it was the first such pop-up, so delays are understandable but definitely something to work on. You don’t want people getting antsy. Luckily, they put a whole pitcher of water (cucumber water!) down for the table, so that was a spectacular move. People who work in restaurants or know people that do: ALWAYS give a table a jug of water, or at least the option to have one, ESPECIALLY if your place uses those bullshit glasses that fit about half an ounce of liquid in them and after every sip you need to flag down someone for more water but since this is London they never come. Those glasses are bullshit and should never have been made legal. So, pitchers are great, and every restaurant in the history and future of the world to ever exist should learn this.

      Lastly, we had dessert, because that’s usually when people have dessert, except for one really strange fashion editor I worked for one summer in NYC who had dessert before her meals. She was strange for other reasons. Anyway, dessert was apple and papaya crumble with malt and vanilla coconut cream. We had some disagreement at our table as to whether the coconut cream would be ‘malt and vanilla’ flavored or whether the malt was a separate ingredient. I thought the latter and I was right, which restored some of my faith in my ability to make decisions. I think the malt aspect was a tiny bit of molasses-like syrup dotted on the crumble, or it could have been the flavor of granola-like topping. We can never be sure, though, because malt isn’t actually a real thing. It’s just something American candy makers and old-timey ice cream shoppes would advertise as a way to charge an extra 5c but it was really a lie. Malt is a lie. No I’m just joking I’m sure it’s a real thing I just have no idea what it is because I never liked those malted milk balls as a kid and I would never order a malted milkshake when a perfectly good chocolate milkshake was perfectly good without it. So I just don’t know. Anyway, dessert might have been the best part of the meal. Well no the soup that I didn’t have was my favorite, but the crumble was next. We were surprised at how well papaya worked to break up the apple flavor, especially because baked papaya seemed to have a lot more flavor than raw papaya. A wonderful combination. On the side was a separate cup of perfect coconut cream, like an actual cup. It was so much! It was probably too much but I will never look a gift coconut cream in the mouth. It was so decadent and smooth and light, the perfect consistency and flavor. Coconut cream is RG.

​         Before we returned to the somehow freezing again weather, Tomi’s friend made a speech that was the cutest, sweetest thing except when he said he thought vegan food was terrible at one point in his life, before her. Get a new story, omnivores! Y’all are a broken record! No but it was really sweet and it just seemed like all the guests at this first pop-up were nice people who wanted to support this nice person. There were some flaws but for the first go, it showed so much potential and I’m excited to see (eat) what’s to come. 

VEGAN NIGERIAN POP-UP AT RAW
Water speed: Took a bit to get water, but when it came, it came in a big pitcher. That’s the way uh huh uh huh.
Service: I’ll give a pass since they were friends volunteering I think, and that’s super nice. One thing to learn next time is to bring the food for everyone at one table at once. Guy would come out with four plates, give two to the table next to us, and then two to our table, leaving another two at our table to wait for like 10 minutes for the next batch, and we aren’t heathens so we’d wait, and it was supes awk.
Bathrooms: The bathrooms are down a hall of the hotel (very close to the space) and SUPER DARK. Like, I didn’t know how to exit the first time. It was kind of scary dark, use the flashlight on your phone dark. I also got stuck in the stall once because I was pushing out but it’s a pull-in door. Dumb. 
Food: Very enjoyable and shows a lot of potential.
Bonus: New nice-seeming person to look out for!