Vegan Guide to Michelin Restaurants: Gauthier, Soho

       Not that I know what your childhood was like, let alone what the defining tastes of it were, but I’m assuming these will give you such nostalgia you’ll be compelled to call your best friend from day camp.
    This evening, I felt compelled to make caramel cookies with these fancy new accidentally vegan products (caramel extract and caramel chips!! score!) I found. I winged a recipe, expecting (hoping?) to test a few batches to get it right, but I loved the first ones! As I bit into my first of many, I realized oh my god I know this taste! But what was it? It was CHILDHOOD .

    But telling myself “it’s just childhood!” wasn’t going to cut it. I needed to figure out what it was! I had vague flashes of memories of eating really fast breakfasts before going to, well, day camp. But that wasn’t a lot to go on, except to recall that I was around age 8 because I went to overnight camp at age 10 like a badass mofo. So hmm what did I used to eat for breakfast when I was 8? Oh yes! Microwave pancakes and Eggo waffles!! These taste like microwave breakfast doughs? That isn’t a huge selling point, I guess. Also it isn’t exactly right. We are getting closer though! 
    Luckily, husband came home and tried one and said, in the nicest way, that it tasted like cheap maple syrup, or really cheap pancake syrup that has no real maple in it. Yes! That’s it! These cookies, these magical flashback cookies, taste like the melted butter-cheap pancake syrup mixture my mom would make my brother and me for our microwave pancakes and waffles! THE BEST THING EVER! IN COOKIE FORM! Hence why I’m calling them waffle cookies. They taste like the waffles of childhood. Cue the music. 

    For those in the London area, the products I used are Dr Oetker’s caramel flavor (I’m sorry, flavour) and random caramel chips from Kosher Kingdom in Golders Green (that shop is a veritable gold mine of accidentally vegan baking chip flavours). For those in America, if you can’t find your own versions, I’d be happy to bring you some in January if you want to meet me in NYC. It’ll cost you either the price of a Broadway show ticket OR enough food to satisfy me at Cinnamon Snail. Hahahah you think you know which one’s cheaper! That’s adorable! 

      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:

     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! 

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. 

          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. 

      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. 

     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.