Beijing, China: Adventures in Health and Electronicsby Randi / August 5, 2017Beijing, China: Give Me All Your Dumplings and Also All The Other Food
Remember a few weeks ago I was complaining about something or other, as I do, and got scared that I wouldn’t be able to find vegan dumplings in China, the one thing that would make it all worth it? Haha maybe dumplings aren’t that powerful but they are amazing and I had so many dumplings, guys. We even went to a place just called Vegetarian Dumpling. Twice. The food in Beijing was incredible, and I would happily go back there to hit more of the places on my list. After the boring food of Siberia and Mongolia, China so far has been a food paradise. There’s enough English spoken in Beijing that finding out what was vegan at regular restaurants was pretty simple, but when there are so many all vegan 0r vegetarian restaurants to try, why even bother elsewhere?
As soon as we got to Beijing, we walked from our hotel to one of the SUHU Vegetarian Tiger locations, the one in the Fullink Plaza. We walked at least an hour (we really wanted to move and not get on another train by taking the strong metro system immediately), so by the time we arrived we were super hungry and ready to pounce like the titular tiger but on vegan food. It was a weird time because we landed in the city in the afternoon, so we got to SUHU at about 4pm. Luckily they don’t close in between regular meal times, like so many restaurants in China do. However, it was super awkward because 99% of their numerous staff was sleeping at tables with curtains drawn around them. I thought only the Spanish napped in the afternoon while still at work! The restaurant is giant, and very nice, but seeing all these sleeping workers and trying not to bother them was hilariously weird. Whatever, I’m just glad someone was awake to let us in and cook for us, because this is one of my favorite restaurants, anywhere.
Beautiful, right? Behind that center curtain was a table full of a dozen sleeping Chinese people
Given how tired I was after the train and the super loud Canadians I had to deal with, trying to choose what to order from the NEVERENDING MENU was actually stressful. Amazingly lucky, but stressful! Not only was there a big coffee-table-book style menu measuring 13×15 inches with beautiful full size pictures of everything, but they had a second smaller menu with even more house specialies. Ahh it was too much choice! And, even though it says Vegetarian right in the name, and on HappyCow it’s listed as a vegetarian not a vegan restaurant, the About page of the menu says they don’t use dairy or eggs, so like, maybe there’s some honey in some desserts but that doesn’t help me decide what food to order! How do people without special diets order at regular restaurants?! How do you know what you want if there’s not just one vegan option?
Bean curd noodles and TOON
little eels
We decided before we ordered that we would come back another day, which took a lot of the pressure off. First of all, I needed to get a toon dish, because Jojo raved about toon. I chose bean curd ‘noodles’ (like fettuccine-shaped strips I’ve seen everywhere in China) mixed with the delicate green leaf that I learned was toon. I had no idea! It’s like a little green sprout (little green ghouls mannn!) and it’s usually eaten raw so sign me up. This was a perfect dish for me after all this travel – the very mild freshness of toon mixed with the protein-packed bean curd to make a great starter salad. Definitely the kind of thing I would eat every day!
We next tried one of the famed vegetarian eel dishes. I was surprised to see how tiny the portion was, considering how the other plates were pretty big, but considering how much food we ordered, it was for the best (although for the price, it’s kind of a dick move). The eel did not disappoint! It’s been a minute since I’ve had real eel, so my memory is hazy, but it tasted as much like the real thing as I’d want! Caramelized slightly sweet skin and that really good fishy-but-not-gross-fishy flavor and a pretty spot-on texture, so I was a fan of this dish. Maybe I do want more…in the past…however that works.
noodles and veggies and peanuts and mushrooms and more veggies ahhh
DUMPLINGS
Next we tried a simple but delicious noodle dish, with glass noodles, spiralized and marinated vegetables of all/indiscriminate sorts, tofu skin, peanuts, mushrooms, and sesame seeds and oil. It was so yummy! And, of course, because they had dumplings on the menu, I had to get them! I got the Shanghai style, which are a little soupier (but not as soupy as legit soup dumplings which I really want to find vegan version of SOMETIME ughh. These were I think cabbage and miscellaneous other veg. I had been in China for like 3 hours and hadn’t had dumplings yet; I had a quota to fulfill! They were good! Are any dumplings ever bad?? Ahhh love them.
The craziest thing we ordered at SUHU was the purple yam. I know you’re thinking, like, okay, that’s just what most people think are sweet potatoes, what’s the big deal. Well just look at how it was served:
I KNOW
Can you even believe that that whipped cream looking business comes from a tuber? The whipped yam was mixed with a little sugar and a little magic and drizzled with blueberry sauce. It was SO good. It tasted like cheesecake, actually, but not in a disgusting cheesecake way, in an amaaazing way. Literally the only problem with this was that three fluffy clouds of it were too many. It’s so filling and rich-seeming that it’s hard to eat a lot of. But it was so delicious!
some kind of grass
On our other visit, we ordered much more conservatively. Well, not much. Actually, maybe not at all. We never do. For my requisite green vegetable, I got this lightly sauteed dish of what I want to say are pea shoots, though it was a lot more sturdy of a stem than I’m used to with those – in a good way, they kept some bite and weren’t mushy. Very good! The mildness of this dish was necessary to combat the incredible heat of our tofu dish.
CHILIEST TOFU DISH EVER JOJO TURN AWAY
The tofu dish was incredible – dense (obviously pressed, good job!) hard little cubes of tofu covered in a spicy garlicky black sauce, with beans (beans!) of various sorts, a few small-cut vegetables, and most of all, CHILI and other peppers that made it suuuper spicy! We like spicy food (and are super excited for Sichuan province) so this was awesome. And despite the air conditioning in the restaurant, we were actually sweating and had to blow our noses a lot while eating it! Haha so fun!
Less fun was our Singapore noodle dish, which on the menu looked like a good plate of noodles and accompaniment but in reality was a bowl of broth with noodles (and lots of chilis!) in it! We didn’t order soup! It was fine, just a little bit not what we wanted.
SOUP! I MEAN NOODLE SOUP! I MEAN SOUP!
Obviously, I couldn’t go a meal without ordering dumplings, so this time I got the regular steamed dumplings, which were great, as all dumplings are. The two different colors had slightly different tangs to them but still it was mostly a game of cabbage, tofu, and some other standard dumpling stuff. I packed up most of these for the train to Shanghai we took later that last night, and they were perfect train food.
dumplings!
trickster little sesame buns
I wanted to order the hatcake that Jojo recommended, but for some reason my brain wanted me to order sesame buns to save for dessert later. I assumed they were the sweet, super chewy type of sesame bun I love from Chinatowns the world over, but instead they were buttery and flaky, falling apart in your mouth. Which sounds amazing, I know, and they were good, but I just don’t really like buttery and flaky, I like chewy. Regardless, SUHU was incredible and if I’m ever back in Beijing it would probably be my first stop.
I guess it’s really called Vegetarian AND Dumpling but no one says that
Well, it might be my second stop. Another place I absolutely adored was the well-named Vegetarian Dumpling, which was only 15 minutes walk from our hotel and so easy to get to that I went myself (without google maps or cell access at all!) once. The menu has English translations, the dumpling list has eggs next to the stuff that has eggs, it has good wifi, and it was full of actual Chinese people. All wins!
well-marked egg alerts!
The number of dumplings without the egg symbol is a bit limited, but they all still sounded great so we chose three. I read a lot about how Vegetarian Dumpling makes you order a double order of each kind you want, so 10 dumplings instead of the 5 that come in one order. I said, 1) if that was the case why don’t they just make the order size 10? and b) if it is true/so stupid then we will just cross one of the three we chose off!
The waitress came, looked at our order form (you check off what dishes you want and how many of them), and changed all the 1’s we put next to the dumplings into 2’s. So, it is true, and they are not just changing the official order size and price which makes SO MUCH MORE SENSE, but anyway, in more important news, we idiots could not decide what dumpling to cross off because they all sounded good so we just said FORGET IT BRING US ALL 30 DUMPLINGS. 30 dumplings is a lot, guys.
And guess what, having a limited number of vegan dumpling choices did not make ordering here any easier, because they still had an EPIC long menu of regular Chinese food! Ahhhh it looked just as good if not better than SUHU. We decided on a sauteed green vegetable with beans (BEANS!), plus one of their advertised (on the wall) specialties – a stewed meatball and cabbage (or other similar green) dish. SO MUCH FOOD. And it was all great.
30 DUMPLINGS
AHHH SO MANY DUMPLINGS! They were all great too. We got the cabbage and peanut, which was probably the weakest of the three but hey still a dumpling; the carrot, cucumber, black mushroom, black fungus (how’s that different) and vermicelli kind, which was great; and the sweet and sour shredded potato option, which somehow was the best of the three. SO interesting and great! You’d think that after struggling to eat 15 dumplings each I would be sooo over them by now, but that lasted approximately 12 hours.
The stewed meatball dish we got was one of the best things we ate in Beijing. It had NO business being that incredible. So delicious! Oh man! And the greens and beans were great too, if standard, but that’s what I want out of my greens usually.
THAT’S A SPICY MEATABALL no it wasn’t spicy but it was delish
Greens & beans are my favorite thing! Greens & beans are my favorite (beat) thing!
I was ecstatic to see cucumber juice on the list of fresh juices, the only non-fruit (well they have carrot but that doesn’t count) option. I ordered it and was SO happy to discover that it really was JUST cucumber juice! No mixing with apple or other bullshit that every non-Chinese juice place does! It was sooo good. I would soon learn that plain cucumber juice is hella prevalent all over China! Score!
Z ordered a drink called ‘syrup of plum’ out of sheer curiosity. It was not delicious.
I went back another night and had an incredible homestyle tofu dish, cooked and served in a black clay pot that DID NOT COOL OFF. I also had this raw cabbage and peanut salad that was just perfection.
I went back another night and had an incredible homestyle tofu dish, cooked and served in a black clay pot that DID NOT COOL OFF. I also had this raw cabbage and peanut salad that was just perfection.
The tofu dish was my very first dish that would fall under the ‘gelatinous’ category of Chinese cuisine! I don’t know how they did it or why but it was good and not a gross consistency as I’d expect! The cabbage salad was a perfect food for me. The dressing was light and soo delicious, very fresh herb-y and if I didn’t have such a bastardized palette I’d tell you which herbs.
Did I…did I not get dumplings this time??? What’s wrong with me!
I love Vegetarian Dumpling so much. It was pretty darn cheap, too, for SOOO much food. I wish they had one closer to me.
Another vegetarian restaurant we went to was Baihe Lily. This was not our first choice – after seeing the Lama and Confucian Temples, we wanted to go to a very closeby veg restaurant called Xu Xiang Zhai Vegetarian that was in the book and highly recommended. It sounded amazing! We got there, and it was NO LONGER IN EXISTENCE. BOOOO. The closest veg restaurant we could find on Google (we were hangry, no time to travel to something too far) was Baihe Lily. The food was good, but I can’t recommend it really because it’s super overpriced, frustrating to order, and impossible to get service.
First of all, the menus are tablets. Like, electronic little fake iPad looking jawns. So cool and technologically advanced, right? No it was the moooost annoying thing ever. You can’t go back and look at things that looked good without going through 100 other pictures, and then trying to go back and find where you left off. WORST OF ALL, you can’t keep going through and pointing to the things you want to order! They had a kind of online shopping style checkout way to order, by adding things to your cart, but unlike the menu descriptions, the things added only in Chinese so if you added something by accident you couldn’t figure out which thing to delete and would just have to start over and OMG MY AGITAAAA.
Second, no one came back to the dining room to do any of the service in an appropriate fashion. We had to keep flagging someone out in the lobby to order, to pay, &c. During our meal, a white woman was seated at the table next to us. We had seen her at the temples that morning so we made friendly small talk. We finished our meal before anyone even came to give her A MENU. When we saw someone, we asked ‘can someone please get this girl a menu?’ and no one did, so she left without even ordering. UNACCEPTABLE.
Luckily, the food was pretty great. We had this cool vegetarian spare rib-meat kind of dish that was excellent, and of course a plate of leafy greens.
They had a salad-y handroll looking thing that I’m always into, full of sprouts and other salad-y things. Unfortunately, the pink sauce tasting weirdly strawberry yogurty, and even if it was vegan, yogurt is gross, so blech. It reminded me of the gross pink dip that comes in supermarket fruit trays. no no no.
We of course got a noodle dish that was really good, the mix-it-yourself kind that has all the good herbs and peanuts and cucumber strips and spiciness but then when you mix it together like you have to in order to eat it all the good stuff sinks to the bottom and even though that’s annoying that’s just science and it’s all still soo good. We lastly got one of my favorite things, the fried vegetarian fish roll sort of jawn that I get all the time at our favorite London Chinatown restaurant. Leong’s Legends.
I love these weird fried tofu-skin-wrapped veggie fish rolls so much I obviously forgot to take a picture before I ate half
So, yeah, all the food was mostly great! So if you are okay with bad service and frustrating order process, then by all means go to Baihe. But, it was also the most expensive restaurant we had been to since, well, the start of this summer’s travels! Sure it wasn’t as much as a meal like this would cost in London, but that’s a pretty high bar considering how expensive London is and how cheap China is. A pot of the most basic tea, for example, was 65 yuan – at most other places it’s, like, 10. That’s crazy! We did not order the tea.
A few meals were not at all-vegetarian restaurants, if you can believe it! In the APM Mall (SO MANY MALLS IN BEIJING I LOVE IT, AIR CONDITIONING AND BUBBLE TEA!) was an outpost of the very famous Din Tai Fung restaurant, which is in the New York Times Top 10 in the world, apparently. Crazy. There’s one opening soon in London, which I imagine will be priced at 100x as much, because it was pretty cheap and casual and hectic for being so highly ranked. It also was, like, just okay. Granted, they just didn’t have that much for vegans, so I got the standard Chinese restaurant order of a sauteed garlicky leafy green plus another leafy green with bean curd (the smallest amount of bean curd ever served in China) and plain rice. It was fine, perfunctory, but like, not even in the top ten of restaurants we went to in Beijing. I’m sure for Z it was better. The best thing about it, though, was that an official manager lady, complete with microphone headset for running the large restaurant, came over with not-our-waiter, and asked if they would take our photos while we were eating! We were like…seriously? We are used to people asking to take our pictures, or take pics with us, because we are white, but that’s out in the world from regular people. Being asked by the MANAGER of an important restaurant? SO WEIRD! And we were eating! I was literally chewing with food in my mouth and was like um noo thanks you are not taking me with my mouth full of food and then what, putting a poster on the front wall? To quote Danielle Brooks as Sophia in The Color Purple, ‘heeeeeeell no. HELL NO.’ But like, why the manager? And why us? It was full of other whites who were slightly less sweaty, so why us? Did they think I was famous? Who did they think I was? Now I’m curious. But thank goodness I’m not now on Din Tai Fung’s promotional materials before I was able to take my 3rd shower of the day.
Basic food at Din Tai Fung
Fortunately, outside the APM mall (and just everywhere on the streets) are tons of fruit carts selling great fresh fruit. I scored this little bucket of melon for 10 yuan.
Another night, we went into another random mall and found a decent restaurant. I got a thing of greens (always!) and the FUNNIEST salad I’ve ever seen. It was amazing.
Guys I have no idea what this salad vegetable is! The menu translated as some sort of ice preserved plant, but it wasn’t iceberg lettuce, as I kind of suspected. If you look closely at the stem, you can see little clear beading, like water droplets. But it wasn’t little ice crystals! It was like…fake ice crystals? But it didn’t affect the taste at all, it just somehow made the VEGETABLE kind of icy? It was insane we were hysterical just like what is going on! It was actually really good. It came with a nice sesame dressing but the taste of the vegetable itself was so good and interesting that we preferred it plain. Just like…what is the process they put it through?! It’s so cray.
Early in our visit, we went to the Zheng Long Zhai Vegetarian Shop to stock up on goodies, as per Jojo’s recommendation. It is a little hard to find and not really near anything convenient, but it’s so worth going to. They have all these amazing jerky packets, like beef jerky and stuff, of 100 different sorts and it’s all vegan!
I can’t rotate the picture above without crashing the computer (thanks Weebly!), but you can see it’s a LOT of fun stuff. I bought one or two of literally all the jerky options, and most are really good. A little soft for my taste (I’m not supposed to be cooking them…right? They are portable food!…right?) but great, seitan-y goodness. They will so come in handy in the ‘stans, if I don’t eat them all beforehand. I also got two pancake-style single-serving food things, one yuba, and one mushroom. I wish I got more of them because they were delicious. Darn. Then, they have a giant bakery section, for such an incredibly tiny store (so tiny). Everything apparently is vegan! I got a box of crunchy rice cakes that I thought would be like the ones I was addicted to in Thailand – that is, sugary – but they were just plain rice! I was kind of mad but it’s better because they make great daytime snacks while out and about instead of just dessert. I got a few little pastry things that looked great but ended up being buttery flaky things, which you know by now aren’t my favorite, but they were still good. My favorite thing was that pancake looking thing! It was filled with a just barely sweet bean paste and I wish I got a ton of them! So yummy. The cellophane bag of little brown squares I assumed would be peanutty, but despite being fine I really cannot tell what the crap they are. The strangest thing about Chinese dessert, I’ve learned, is that – for a country where people drink bubble tea and juice and all drinks so flipping sweet that just one sip will give you the ‘beetus, their desserts have the smallest amounts of sugar possible to still qualify as dessert. Actually, some things I wouldn’t even let qualify as dessert, they are so non-sweet! It’s crazy! Seriously, I bought a tea from a fridge case once and had to throw it away because it was like pure high-fructose corn syrup. And I get my bubble teas (MY FAVORITE THING NOW, more on those in later posts because I didn’t take pics in Beijing I was too busy eating all the tapioca balls immediately and pouring out the tea just kidding but I would do that) at the ‘zero sugar’ or ‘25% the regular sugar’ options, and they are still hella sweet! It’s so weird that all the drinks are way too sugary but the desserts aren’t sugary enough! Let the two categories share the sugar amounts and both would then be perfect!
Regardless, this vegetarian shop is a must visit if you are traveling for a while and need snacks and emergency protein strips.
In the complete opposite world, we also stopped at a Wal-Mart. They have Wal-Marts all over China! And while 90% is Chinese products, they do have a decent amount of recognizable stuff. Like sooo many weird flavored Oreos! We tried the vanilla sundae kind – reeeeally good! – and the strawberry kind – reeeeally gross! We got some candy and some drinks, including a lot of what we thought was cranberry and blueberry juice (as per doctor’s orders!), a really good apple cider vinegar drink, and an almond milk. Some of that is pictured; I think I forgot to take stuff out of another bag.
The giant carton of coconut water came in handy on our exhausting sweaty trek of the Great Wall (next post!). Those macadamia chocolates are accidentally vegan and we see them EVERYWHERE! Remind me to get more before we leave China. They’re even in Family Marts and 7-11! Those little blue and red tubes in the middle, guess what they are? SINGLE SERVE PEANUT BUTTER PACKS BOIIIII! And the blue is Skippy! Ahhhh! I don’t like Skippy when I’m home but I’m very excited about having it in central Asia! The red kind is the Chinese (and cheaper) option. Yas peanut butter!
Lastly, I have to share one of my favorite things. After my doctor’s appointment, we went into a nearby office building to pee, and of course the basement where the toilets were had an epic food court/mall style set up because every single building does. The very first thing I ran into?
A JUICE BAR!!! Despite doctor’s orders to consume berries, I of course ordered the greenest option on the menu (which was also in English!) because I can’t not! If it’s my only real green juice/smoothie opportunity for 4 months, I’m going to get the greenest one obviously! It was peasprouts, lettuce, pineapple, apple, and orange I think. I think I added spinach? It tasted just like peashoots, and you know what? I loved it. (Z did not.)
Well that’s all the food in Beijing that I have pictures of, so that’s all we’re going to talk about! The food really is incredible. I’m sure with five weeks in China, I’ll get sick of Chinese food at some point, but I don’t see that happening soon.
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One Short Day in the Capital City: A Quick Tour of Brussels
Obviously (it’s so obvious guys) you’re supposed to sing the title of this post to the tune of the song from Wicked: “one short day in the Emerald city/one short day full of so much to do/every way that you look in this city/there’s something exquisite/you’ll want to visit/before the day’s through.” Except…except (sorry to my Belgian friends) but Brussels is kind of x. X means whatever. Every way you look in Brussels, there’s not something exquisite. And you might not want to visit. But if you are visiting another, more charming place in the country, like Bruges, which we talked about before, you will likely be passing through the capital. So here’s what to do if you find yourself with some time in this Detroit of Europe (no offense to Detroit, just that it’s like…industrial and charmless).
Things
The only really nice to look at part of Brussels is the Grand Place, the central square of Brussels and the most crowded place in Europe outside of Parisian museums and the London tube after work. A UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Grand Place is often named the most beautiful square in the world, which is…surprising. It’s nice, don’t get me wrong, but the most beautiful square in the world? Maybe in August every other year, when they do the incredible flower carpet over the entire thing. But in winter? It’s fine. I’m fine.
I enjoyed the pinkish purpley lights and the giant Christmas tree. And while it is very nice, it’s not my favorite thing in the city. For someone who talks SO GD MUCH about how often she has to pee, I know you know exactly what my favorite thing in Brussels is:
Manneken Pis! I know it’s so stupid and so touristy but there is a STATUE in the CAPITAL OF EUROPE of a LITTLE BOY PEEING and it’s the MOST FAMOUS SYMBOL OF THE BELGIAN PEOPLE. You cannot tell me there’s anything better than that. Little Boy Piss is smaller than you expect, about the size of a child his age would be so it’s actually easy to miss on its unassuming lil street corner about 5 minutes from the Grand Place.
It’s said that Little Pissing Man (actual translation) represents the people of Belgium’s independence of mind and sense of humor, which I’d say is true about the fact that this statue exists and is on display, but the actual statue represents their tendency to pee outside.
The statue dates from the early 1600s, and this one is a replica; the real one is in the Brussels City Museum. There are several legends associated with Manneken Pis, and they are all incredible because they all are about a little boy urinating and they all try to explain why that was a momentous event. It’s really extraordinary. They’re all amazing but I’ll share one: in the 14th century, Brussels was under siege by a foreign power, and the attackers placed explosives at the city walls to finish things but seriously. A little boy was spying on the attackers as they prepared and he urinated on the burning fuse and, of course, saved the city. Brussels wants you to know that peeing outside can save lives.
So most people know about Manneken Pis, but did you know about his sister-in-crime, (not me) Jeanneke Pis??!! There’s another little pissing child statue in Brussels and it’s a girl! I honestly cannot.
Jeanneke Pis is located down a dark (and pot-filled) alley so it is not as touristed as Manneken Pis. Gender discrimination, I think. Jeanneke was built as a companion piece to the little piss boy, and she was commissioned in (checks notes) THE YEAR OF MY BIRTH! She’s my spirit statue! She’s behind bars because even Europeans are still lagging behind on women’s rights you’re supposed to throw coins into her fountain and make a wish. Great stuff, Brussels.
Food
Like all capital cities worth their salt, Brussels has some great options for vegans, especially compared with the last time I visited the city like 15 years ago, ugh and oh no. Hooray for progress! Not only is there tons of vegan chocolate even in the chain stores as we saw in Bruges, there’s also now VEGAN WAFFLES!!! But before I share the waffles, you’ll have to eat your vegetables, unless you’re that idiot pathetic man who complained about the Golden Globes going vegan when it’s a) a free meal b) ONE meal and c) he would never be invited, ya basic!; if you’re that guy you don’t get anything.
For lunch in Brussels, I did all my HappyCow research and decided on the most predictable choice for my salad-and-bowl-loving self: Yummy Bowl. It’s a vegetarian bowl joint. They make bowls, like full of all kinds of vegetables. It’s literally perfect.
Well it’s not perfect perfect because I went up to the counter when I arrived and was told to sit and that someone would take my order from the table which is fine but then for the next 30 minutes they took people’s orders at the counters???!!! Like yes all those jackfruits were doing it wrong but they still got served first so the lesson is NEVER FOLLOW THE RULES. But finally I ordered my Super Bowl (not to be confused with the upcoming football game that can EAT my SHORTS because the Eagles are out (are you proud, fam, doesn’t it seem like I actually care? #goeagles (look I did it again!))).
My Super Bowl, like Walt Whitman, contained MULTITUDES: red and white quinoa, young shoots and baby leaves salad, gomasio tofu, avocado hummus, garlic grilled green beans, red cabbage, roasted sweet potatoes, edamame, marinated zucchini, grilled broccoli, mango, pomegranate seeds, goji berries, sunflower seeds, and lemon curcuma dressing. I KNOW! ALL THESE THINGS MIXED TOGETHER! Obviously I sang like the boy in Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit (“Oh Happy DAYYYY”).
I know some of you are like ‘um you know they have vegan burgers and fries and stuff in Brussels, right’ but you know I love a loaded salad like nothing else. And I got a waffle for you! Well not ‘for you’ but for you, know what I mean?
Let’s take a walk through this GORGEOUS arcade to find our vegan waffles!
Here we are!
Vegan Waf is, you guessed it, the vegan waffle joint in Brussels that I say is a MUST VISIT. This was SO DELICIOUS, not to be confused with the best ice cream brand but man alive did you know? Did you know about waffles??!!! Like about real Belgian waffles? I think I had one when I was first in Belgium but I wasn’t vegan yet so I didn’t appreciate it because I was probably like “yeah I can eat this I can eat ANYTHING I don’t even care!” but now I care.
If you aren’t vegan, or you drink beer, or both, I even have a recommendation for you! Before our train home to Londres, we whiled away the hours (conferring with the flowers) at La Mort Subite, which is a very direly named old-fashioned bar that is suuuupes classic and like French if you are looking for that sort of thing. Rude old men waiters, enormous blocks of cheese, amazing beer (so I’m told), so I have it on good authority (husbo’s) that you should go there. We sat at the window and the people at the table outside had a dog so I was set.
Anyway that’s literally all we did in Brussels.
Sleep
I don’t actually have a recommendation for you, I have an anti-recommendation. An opposite torture, as Michael would say. We arrived in Belgium on the late night Eurostar, so we slept in Brussels before leaving first thing in the morning for Bruges. We stayed in the B&B Hotel Brussels Centre Gare du Midi, right across the street from the train station, just for a cheap simple place to spend the night. It was literally the worst, most uncomfortable bed I’ve ever encountered, and I’ve slept in some random places all over the world. So, just a warning.
Brussels might not be the most charming to look at, but there’s lots of culture that you should immerse yourself in, via the many many museums and tours and more. I did that last time so this was just for how to pass your short day in the non-emerald city. Goodbye!
Eating Vegan in Moscow: Highs, Lows, and Our New Second Home
My eating in Moscow started off dire but ended up in strong contention for my favorite food of the trip, thanks (and no thanks) to a wildly uneven list. Due to some HappyCow reviewers whom I no longer trust, I decided my first stop would be at Prime Cafe because they had juices, salads, and wraps. Sure they did, but it ended up being 100% a copy of Pret a Manger. And the old-style Pret, not the newfangled wave of super vegan-friendliness that Pret’s doing in London now. First of all, it was so hard to find because it wasn’t actually called Prime Cafe on HappyCow; it was just listed as its address, which Google maps didn’t want to find. When we finally found the address and saw it was a Prime Cafe, we realized we had seen this chain all over the city and for no good reason had been heading to this not-super-close location. We learned that night that there was one 10 yards from our hostel.
I ordered a vegetable juice right off the drinks board but for some reason the staff laughed at me. Maybe no one orders it. Maybe I just said the words slightly off because I’ve never met people so obsessed with precisely how things are pronounced like Russians are. I think they are just messing with us. Like in English if someone came up to you and said maybe “tree teeckets plees” you’d know they were saying three tickets please. Yet in Russian we’ll say things pretty accurately but because it’s not in a perfect accent people are like what what what??? I don’t understand? And I’m like YOU REALLY DO, YOU’RE JUST BEING A DICK. Anyway, the juice. It was fine but took forever to make and I was just chilling by the counter waiting for it and everyone kept saying things to me that I didn’t understand. I also got the only vegan salad and the only vegan wrap I could find in the fridge case. So, just like Pret but with fewer options. Whoever gave this place great reviews for vegans needs their membership reexplored.
The salad was mostly corn and red pepper, but it did have some kidney beans and maybe pinto beans in there, and it’ll probably be the only beans I find this whole summer so that was great. I mean it didn’t taste particularly great, it was fine, but it was great to have beans. I love beans. The wrap I got was sub-Pret, with one half inedible because it had gotten that gross wrap-sliminess that happens within five minutes of making a wrap and refrigerating it. Grilled wraps 4eva. So even though these Russian Prets were literally on every block (as with regular Pret), I didn’t go back there.
Perfect salad at Fresh
Luckily, Husband’s former London colleague who now lives in Moscow introduced us to my new favorite restaurant called Fresh. It is sooo awesomeeeee. The food is so good and the menu so damn perfect that I forgive them for their tagline being “Healthy is the new Sexy”. Barffff. But yummy food! They had my dream food – big salads full of greens and veggies and chickpeas and grilled tofu and then fun things like tempura-ed oyster mushrooms and grilled sweet potatoes and just ugh I love salads like that! Dream! They also had really good burgers and an extensive smoothie and juice menu, like more than I could hope for even in NYC or London. It was perfect!
yummy magic mushroom salad at Fresh
Over the course of several lunches (okay I admit just two but we ordered enough food for like 4), we tried a lot of dishes. My favorite was my first salad (first pictured above), called the All Stars Salad, with lots of raw spinach and sunflower sprouts with grilled sweet potatoes, slabs of grilled tofu, avocado, a quinoa and adzuki tabouleh, and a yummy sauce. I later got the Magic Mushroom salad (second salad above) which was also really good and had the aforementioned crispy oyster mushrooms mixed it. I wish there were a few more of those. It also had caramelized apple slices, more sunflower sprouts, and pecans. Really, that mushroom salad would have been the winner if it had a better dressing. As it was, it only came with vegan sour cream, which is gross to me but Russians live on their sour cream so I guess it’s popular like that. I just poured in salsa and sauces from our other plates that day and it was great. Both salads came doused in a goji berry & mixed superfood seed mix, which was an awesome addition. I hope those salads provide continued nutrients for me weeks afterwards like when I had cookies and bread for dinner on the train.
Yay chocolate and kale! |
Yay green smoothies! |
The real winners at Fresh were its amazing smoothies. Over our visits, we tried three smoothies. First, the Green Goddess, with broccoli, spinach, pineapple, mango, banana, orange, and green superfood mix. Then I tried the fun Super Kale, with pear, ginger, cucumber (coo coom ba), kale, mint, cilantro, pineapple, and ‘cannabis seeds’ as was written in the menu. And lastly a chocolate peanut butter banana cup of deliciousness. My fave was the Green Goddess but I was most intrigued by the Super Kale one and those cannabis seeds, which sounds crazy but I imagine that just means hempseeds, which is totally normal. The choco pb one was as expected delicious, but not too sweet which was nice…but veered on being not sweet enough.
Ordering falafel: good. Ordering vegan onion rings: GOOOOOOD
Is it just a dilla?
We also tried the quesadillas without cheese, which brings up a hilarious Facebook ‘fight’ my Husband has watched unfold on his wall for like years now. Some rando friend has a running joke/argument with someone about how a quesadilla without cheese just can’t exist. So that’s funny. Our nonexistent dilla was really good, chock full of black beans and corn and vegetables and served with avocado cream and salsa. Hard to eat but yummy and yay I got beans again! We also had the falafel plate as an appetizer once; wasn’t our idea (we were a table of 4) because falafel isn’t exactly hard to come by like other things on the menu but hey I’ll never turn down falafel. And as you might have seen in the falafel plate picture above, we also got VEGAN ONION RINGS! They were so good ahhhh!!!
Husband got the BBQ burger one time, which I was incredibly jealous of. It was really good even though I don’t like barbecue sauce. It had onion rings on it! And hot banana chilies. They know how to make burgers. Another time he got the Mexican taco special which I also really enjoyed. I think it was full of TVP, or maybe ground seitan, and lots of lettuce and it was yum.
Of course I also got their vegan cookies to go once or twice. They were very reminiscent of the banana-filled oatmeal I make sometimes – just oats and bananas. I think that’s literally all there was in these cookies. But hey I love oats and bananas so we’re good.
I wish I could go back but I don’t know if I want to go back to Moscow for a trip. I’d be so pumped if they opened a Fresh in London. Oh we do have half a day in Moscow later in our adventure and I’m definitely going there again. Yummm.
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Another very nice vegetarian place we tried was Avocado Cafe, which was similar to Fresh but not quite as good. Maybe it’s because they didn’t bring my soup until everyone else had long finished all their food, which is just terrible service. Luckily that soup was good. It was a chickpea (CHICKPEAS HELLO!) tomato soup with a few various veggies and it was perfect comfort food. I also had a basic but decent green salad with avocado (of course, it’s called that after all) and we all shared fried tofu sticks which were random but damn good.
green salad woohoo 
vegan pelmeni! I hope I find you again! oh woohoo 
another soup veg? lentil? hooray for soup woohoo |
fried tofu woohoo 
delicious but 40 minute late soup woohoo 
first and only vegan ice cream of the trip was full of freezer burn. but the cheesecake was so good |
Husband had the pelmeni, which I was super jealous of because pelmeni is usually made with egg and filled with meat, but these were vegan! I had one but I’m still jealous of them. I want to find vegan pelmeni again! And I was jealous again of Cousin’s dessert. I got ice cream – first and only vegan ice cream we’ve found so far! – and he got blueberry cheesecake but from the raw section, so I was like eww raw cheesecake is always the worst, just thick slabs of pureed cashews so nauseating. But this was actually the best raw cheesecake I’ve ever had. And my precious beloved ice cream had been apparently in the back of their freezer since the end of the Soviet Union because it was a slightly melting but mostly hard as a rock piece of freezer burn. DISAPPOINT.
Luckily, nothing can keep us down long when we are in the presence of our new favorite place, our second home as it became when in St. Petersburg – Teremok! The McDonald’s of fast Russian food but soooo good! In crazy events, the Moscow Teremoks had even bigger lenten/vegan menus!! Hooray the day!
This time, I had the roasted potatoes and pickles and fried onions, plus another vinagret (diced veggie salad in a light vinaigrette). Both were so good but what else would you expect from our beloved Teremok! There’s one in NYC now, guys! Go!!
Near our hostel, there was a pretty fancy grocery store that we went to for emergency water, and lucky that we did because in their fridge section were a few ready-made meals marked as vegan! Such a shock! The one I grabbed was an unfortunate mix of hummus and seaweed in a wrap, so ack, but still, it was vegan!
it says vegansky product!
And I would be remiss if I didn’t share status updates on the constant search for my new favorite bars (although I found a potential new favorite in Yekaterinburg, but we will get there!). The “Take A Bite” bar was pretty easy to find in Moscow – especially at this random grocery near Avocado Cafe:
THEY HAD EVERY FLAVOR GUYS!!!
So, overall Moscow is very vegan-friendly, with a few standout all-veg restaurants that I would happily go back to next time I’m there (in 3 months lol!). Ordering at the regular traditional restaurants requires a little bit of knowledge about Russian food, but still you’re in a city where most people understand a little English and most restaurants have an English menu, so it’s easy. And I know it won’t be this easy again, not until we circle back through Moscow!
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Oh yummm