Hell Yeah Veganism: "Challenge Accepted"by Randi / October 11, 2013
Before spending a week in New Jersey, I asked my PPK friends where I would be able to eat. They came through with plenty of suggestions, as always, but the overriding theme seemed to be ‘Eat at Veggie Heaven above all else!’ Of course, they were right. Veggie Heaven, an Asian vegetarian restaurant in Denville, was all-around delicious, with superb sushi, decent dumplings, and wonderful faux meats used in fun ways. I set out to over-order, as is my wont, and everything was very good.
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Adding another plus, they had fresh juice! I first asked for a shot of wheatgrass, but the waitress informed me that they don’t make that anymore because no one wanted it. (They need to take it off the menu, or bring it back when I go!) So, I got the Veggie Special Juice, with apple, carrot, celery, and beet, and asked to add spinach to it, though I’m not sure if she did because I tasted mainly beet and carrot. It was a nice juice though!
 Steamed spinach dumplings |
 Veggie Special Juice, hopefully with spinach Next were the Steamed Spinach Dumplings. With a very mild and pleasant flavor, they were almost necessary to counteract all the spicier and heavier dishes I ordered. I love steamed dumplings much more than fried, and it was nice to have a solely veg filling instead of faux pork or something thrown in with it.
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Crispy chicken wraps
The next dish was actually a mistake, but a very delicious one. I ordered the Crispy Veggie Chicken Salad, but was brought the Crispy Chicken Wrap. It’s probably my bad, mumbling or something, but it was no big deal because look how pretty! With crispy soy chicken, avocado, spicy mayo, tomatoes, and mixed greens, the wrap was light and delicious, with the fresh veggies thankfully more prominent than the chicken. Also, spicy mayo makes everything delicious. (Except cake. That would be disgusting.)
Tom Yum Chicken over spinach and mustard greens
Since I have a love affair with appetizers (you can order so many!), I only got one entree, and I couldn’t even eat it! The Tom Yum Chicken arrived just so I could take a picture and then ask for it to be packed up. Too much food. Luckily, it provided me with two dinners. The flavor was great. I usually hate Americanized Chinese food entrees, with their sauce-logged components that all seem interchangeable. However, this sauce was not overpowering at all. It had touches of ginger and scallion complementing tons of basil leaves, spinach, and I think mustard greens, all mixed with crispy chicken strips that were perfection. Also, I love that the waitress asked if I wanted white or brown rice even before I could request brown rice. My kind of place! I enjoyed this dish and would recommend it, but I think next time I’d stick to appetizers. I just like being able to try smaller bits of lots of things.
 My favorite thing, naturally, was the sushi roll I will definitely be getting more of someday. The Fashion Roll, as it’s called for no apparent reason, combines faux crispy shrimp (my favorite faux thing, probably because I used to love imitation crab meat. So gross. Don’t judge) with spicy mayo, cucumber, and avocado. You know how I feel about sushi, and this roll reinforced my obsession. It was so good! I used to love all the crazy crispy shrimpy rolls, and this roll totally satisfied my constant craving.
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 Fashion Roll, with soy crispy shrimp and spicy mayo |
Autumn roll, with yummy things in tofu skin and deep-fried
Another standout was the Autumn Roll, a delicious, deep-fried mixture of veggie ham, jicama, and black mushrooms, all rolled in tofu skin and fried to crazy levels of friedness. So good! It was pretty heavy, and I usually don’t enjoy super-fried oily stuff, but this was really good, I admit. But I don’t think I could have eaten the entire dish myself, even if I hadn’t ordered other stuff, because it was so dense and filling. Even so, I’d probably get it again. Have you ever had deep-fried tofu skin? It’s like the coolest kind of wrapper ever! Look at that color! And it provides the perfect kind of bite and chewiness.
I was pretty impressed with Veggie Heaven and I definitely want to return next time I’m in the area. It’s like my version of Pan-Asian comfort food. There’s a lot of heavy, fried food, but it’s easily balanced by many light, fresh-tasting options. I didn’t get the chance to try their vegan desserts because I was counting on Silk almond milk soft-serve at the TCBY around the corner, but of course they didn’t have it. It sucks, because I really want to know if their Fried Tofu Ice Cream is vegan, and if so, what on earth it tastes like. Lesson learned: Always get dessert when you have the chance, and the worst that can happen is extra dessert!
I was pretty impressed with Veggie Heaven and I definitely want to return next time I’m in the area. It’s like my version of Pan-Asian comfort food. There’s a lot of heavy, fried food, but it’s easily balanced by many light, fresh-tasting options. I didn’t get the chance to try their vegan desserts because I was counting on Silk almond milk soft-serve at the TCBY around the corner, but of course they didn’t have it. It sucks, because I really want to know if their Fried Tofu Ice Cream is vegan, and if so, what on earth it tastes like. Lesson learned: Always get dessert when you have the chance, and the worst that can happen is extra dessert!
Veggie Heaven, Denville NJ
- Water speed: Amazing, upholding the Chinese restaurant stereotype
- Bathrooms: Nice single-serves off to the side
- Service: Decent, though I wish my many app plates came at a slower pace
- Food: Yummy!
- Bonus: Juices, vegan desserts, spicy mayo
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Dinner at Vegan Hotel Saorsa 1875
Recently (okay not actually but time is moving too fast, Adam Sandler hit fast forward again or something) we had dinner at Saorsa 1875, the UK’s first vegan hotel as it bills itself, or the Saoirse Ronan hotel, as we call it. It’s located in Pitlochry, Scotland, a lovely tourist town with a great theatre (see here and here). You can’t have dinner here before seeing a show, though, because it’s a tasting menu restaurant where you need to sit and stay and enjoy, which we love. I guess you could see a matinee and then mosey and then have dinner. So all works out!
At our dinner, we were expecting the 5-course tasting menu we had been reading about since the hotel opened. But apparently that’s only on the weekends now, and we were there on a Monday, when it is 3 courses. A wee disappointment, the weeest really, and it’s also priced accordingly so it was a lot cheaper than we expected! It was still lovely, maybe not as weird Michelin-y tasting-y menu-y as we hoped, more ‘this is normal food that you’ll actually enjoy and will actually fill you’, which is nothing to sneeze at. Maybe we will one day go back for the fivers and see what weird shit they come up with, we love weird shit.
First of all, it’s important to know that there are hotel dogs around, so build in time to your visit for petting them properly. There’s one doggo who is sooo old and so sweet and just ugh so nice LOVES IT.
Saoirse operates dinnertime with like one seating, so all the 8-10 wee tables eat the same things at the same time, pretty much. Don’t worry, there are no family-style tables or anything (at least not since covid I think?) so you are spaced away from all the people coughing and generally being gross. While you wait for your table to be ready, you pet the dogs and you hang out at the bar, which has a really nice list of cocktails (both bar and bat). We tried a watermelony non-alc that was good, and I wanted to order another but couldn’t get anyone’s attention before we were ready to move into the main dining room.
I do wish that they had left us in the bar longer, because we sat at the tables awaiting the first course for about 30 minutes before it came, which whatever but no one was filling water or taking drink orders so I had to nearly diminish the reserves in my bag. That water was for the drive home! So service could deffo use a brush-up. Luckily they did bring little dinner rolls around. You had a choice of charcoal or beetroot, two simply incredible choices for bread, right? So I was like ‘puh puh puh porque no los dos???’ but luckily they were much more generous with the bread through the night than the water so I got to try both. Fill up on bread! My fave thing to do!
Okay then the real food started! First up was our baby corn salad – how ballsy is that considering how many people hate baby corn! I guess that might be an American thing because British people seem to love it? Correct me if I’m wrong! This salad had microgreens, big-balled caperberries (always think of Bridget Jones when faced with caperberries), and grilled baby corn. Okay grilling the bc is the way to go. It was a very decent starter salad, sharp and refreshing. I was still waiting for water during and after this course thoooo.
Onto the main! Let’s note that this was the summer menu (I’m a few months post), and though the first course felt appropriately refreshing and summery, the second felt very much appropriate for now, cold and dark winter. It was GREAT, actually, don’t get me wrong, but it didn’t feel seasonal. Here we have roast butternut squash (I know, like wintertime staple), with spicy pumpkin seed pesto, pickled celery, and lemon balm. First off, LOVING the pickled celery. Second, the pesto really was spicy! Way to go this country! It was a really nice mix of flavors, with the dark spicy pesto and the sharp pickled celery. The squash came two ways – cubed and on a bed of itself pureed. And best of all, the ‘chickpea’ listed in the description ended up being chickpea panisse, or a socca block, pick your romance language. I forking love socca so I was happy. It was so creamy and so good, much better than when I make it and you need to have a lot of water on hand because it swallows kinda dry. I think I need more oil/any oil. ANYWAY, a delicious wintry dish.
Again I waited for water for a long time, but the people are nice so I didn’t throw anything.
After another long wait, we got our dessert, and boy was it worth it!
Probably the best dish? I mean I am biased because it was dessert and it had the two dessert necessities – ice cream and chocolate. But man alive this was good! They really buried the lede with that printed menu just saying ‘chocolate torte’ and not the best part: the ice cream was BANANAS. No not ‘banana’, it was tonka bean and vanilla. I have never been able to try tonka bean anything despite really wanting to because it’s always in a dairy option so I was sooo excited to finally try it. And this ice cream was amaaazing. Like wish I could have bought a tub of it to bring home even though there’s no room in the freezer. We’d make it work. Amazing. The torte was fantastic too, like the densest richest chocolate torte ever. I could have done without the passionfruit gel on top because I think there are very very few times when chocolate and fruit actually go together so if it’s not banana or strawberry it’s just gonna be weird and incongruous. It was sour which I guess they wanted to counter all the sweet, but who wants to counter sweet? Crazy people!
But speaking of weird and incongruous but in a fun and good way: that last lump on the plate was all those things! Here we have peppercorn chocolate mousse. Like it’s nice chocolate mousse and there are peppercorns in there. Just for fun I guess. I don’t know if I liked it or just appreciated the weirdness but it was cool to try (once?).
We decided not to get the additional cheese plate, though many did. We were pretty full (and it costs more, and it was unclear if its 15 to share or 15 each person…it can’t possibly be 15 each person right? woof), though maybe next time I would try it, but only if I could get it before the actual dessert. Excuse me, but having a cheese plate after you’ve had ice cream and chocolate torte feels insane. Like who ever heard of eating an oat cake after you’ve had ice cream? It is nonsense to me. I know you disagree but man, if I’m having ice cream and chocolate why would I destroy that by eating anything else afterward? So weird.
So all in all it was a great dinner. Service left a bit to be desired, as it was pretty hard to get anyone’s attention for water or more drinks (and since they had interesting non-alcs I actually wanted one for the first time!), but they were nice and it was all nice. For £35 per person instead of the £60 for the 5 courses, we were pretty happy that we ended up there for a 3 course night. But hopefully one day we will be able to try the 5 and hopefully they will be weird and wonderful. This meal was much more normal, like regular food, which you know can be nice!
SAORSA 1875, PITLOCHRY, SCOTLAND, UK, CRUMBLING WORLD
Water speed: This is the one area that really could be improved! Like I said it was hard to get attention to ask for water or even to order drinks that we would pay money for! What a shame.
Service: See above but they were nice people. YOUR MA’S GOOD PEOPLE.
Bathrooms: There are two single-serves through the lobby of the hotel, pretty nice! Hotel bathrooms tend to be!
Food: Really good, even though we were expecting weird tasting menu shit, it was nice to eat food recognizable as food!
Bonus: Like I said, fully vegan hotel, dedicated to ethics, dogs around, Saoirse Ronan, what else could you want? They also do lunch, though it is a different vibe (burgers I think?). And one day I’ll be back for that tasting menu!
Viasko, Berlin: It Makes You Think of Fiasco But It’s All Good
This is the menu lolol
Another fantastic restaurant in Berlin is Viasko, ostensibly a bar or pub depending on what country you live in (I will call them bubs now) but with really interesting and delicious – and all vegan – food. You’d assume such bar food would be fried shit and what nots, but the menu is a tad nicer and more upscale than the usual bar fare of fried shit and what nots (or just plain gross salads for vegans). I’ve heard you have to go for the buffet brunch (buffet brunch is HUGE in Berlin – we’ll look at one this weekend), but I can recommend going for a really fun dinner with the ambiance of a chill bub. We sat in the basement, which was dimly lit with candles among the all wooden plank furniture. It had a very pirate ship vibe, which is totally fitting because today is apparently Talk Like a Pirate day, the celebration of which will probably get you smacked.
I immediately felt fond of Viasko because printed inside the menus is this incredible Martin Luther King, Jr. quote:
what hideous signage!
Seriously how lovely is that. Ugh he was amazing.
Anyway, if I am not mistaken, this was our very first dinner in Berlin, so we ordered way too much food. Not that that’s really a reason. We were just hungry. I freely over-order in most situations. We started with appetizers of the mixed salad with tempeh and the jalapeno cheese sticks, so my favorite kind of dish ever (salad + tempeh) and the most revolting sounding thing ever (cheese sticks). Both were great!
Anyway, if I am not mistaken, this was our very first dinner in Berlin, so we ordered way too much food. Not that that’s really a reason. We were just hungry. I freely over-order in most situations. We started with appetizers of the mixed salad with tempeh and the jalapeno cheese sticks, so my favorite kind of dish ever (salad + tempeh) and the most revolting sounding thing ever (cheese sticks). Both were great!
Fried tempeh bits forever!
I loved this salad! I wish the lettuce and veggies were cut smaller; it helps me look less gross when I eat if stuff isn’t going to get all over my face. The fried tempeh nuggets were outstanding though. Fried tempeh nuggets are pretty hard to mess up; I’m pretty sure they are like falafel in that there is a very very limited quality range (never bad, always good, can’t really break the ceiling) but oh man, these were fantastic! The perfect addition to any salad and much better than croutons.
Cheese sticks & a big pepper
For the jalapeno cheese sticks, I guess we were expecting the cheesy sticks themselves to be spicy, but instead they surrounded a pepper. I’m sure they were intended to be spicy and the pepper was just there as well, but we were like, oh you just put the pepper on the plate separately, okay. They were interesting. I’m sure if you like fried cheese sticks, then you would love these, but they’re not my thing. Husband says they were good, so yeah I’m the worst person to review stuff like this. Try them and see, I guess.
Watch out for that arugula, gnocchi
Of course we ordered the homemade gnocchi with asparagus (spargel!) because of the spargel. It was delicious! Homemade gnocchi is the best. This dish was in a cashew-pumpkinseed-ramson (wild garlic) pesto with white and green spargel, cherry tomatoes, and arugula. The raw arugula should have been dialed back a little in favor of more spargel, but it was still great.
Bread and hummus are on this plate! Best plate ever!
I was told to get the gyro plate (by either a person or the internet) and I’m so glad I did! Look at that stuff! Anything with bread and hummus is a winner in my book already, but this added olives, some kind of decent kraut (Germany), cucumbers and tomatoes, and of course the delicious soy gyro meat. Granted, this should have come with a flatbread of some sort so you could turn all the components into an actual handheld gyro, but whatever, it was really yummy AND fellow diners got to see me try to make this all handheld anyway (all over the face).
So, I can definitely recommend Viasko for a really fun pub dinner. The atmosphere was great, the service was friendly if slow (we were in a basement), and the food was really fun and overall great. Also, it seemed very affordable. I’d love to go back for more fried tempeh cubes and to try its buffet brunch.
VIASKO, BERLIN
Water speed: Slow because we were in the basement.
Bathrooms: These bathrooms were standard bar/pub style (kind of gross) but decent for their ilk. The best part is that they are absolutely COVERED with stickers and graffiti for vegan-friendly bands, blogs, everything! I need stickers for my blog so I can put them all over bub bathrooms!
Service: Slow.
Food: Great!
Bonus: Great pirate atmosphere.
