London VegFest Weekend: So Much To Eat! So Much To Do…& Eat!

September 30, 2014

For the last official day of VeganMOFO, I want to talk about London’s hottest new nightclub. London’s weekend-long VegFest happened a few days ago, and I was lucky enough to eat my way through both days! It was so fun to be surrounded by like-minded people, including some great friends I am so happy to live near again. The best part of any festival like this is the food, and I was not disappointed here. Okay, I was a little disappointed. The actual food for sale from the many, many caterers was overall subpar. However, the vast number of companies giving delicious samples and the overall spirit of the weekend made up for it. I realize I’m a few days late, but it’s always the right time for judgment.

THE GOOD
The best part of the weekend was the people! I saw my friends from Vegan in Brighton and Alien on Toast (their blog names are so descriptive!), some other mighty fine PPKers, and new blogger friends I admire from Hasta la Vegan and Tea and Sympatico. Jojo spoke to a pretty large crowd about vegan travel, and despite my best efforts to catch her eye and make her laugh, she did a great job! I also caught a little of Brendan Brazier’s talk about using nutrition to reduce stress. Audience members were furiously taking notes during his entire presentation, with their eyes wide and bulging like the crazy alien dog at the end of “Ghostbusters”, so I assume he is now some sort of cult leader and/or too much Vega.

One of the Brassieres

Most of the food and products on offer were fabulous! I loved talking with several company representatives, most of whom were very friendly and helpful. Before I get to good product booths, let’s talk about the food I actually bought.

The best thing I ate were the baked spring rolls full of duck, mustard greens, and sweet chili from this place to the left, The Hungry Gecko, which for two days I thought was called the World Street truck. They were a decent size and priced well at 5£. And they were delicious! I had never heard of this company before and was pleasantly surprised by these rolls. Unfortunately, the next thing I tried from them (and from everyone else, almost) was not as good (see below).

Baked (though they didn’t taste it!) veggie duck spring rolls

One of my absolute favorite stalls at the fest was BFVB, the Big Fat Vegan Bakery. Now this is what festival food should look like, dammit! Everything they sold was ENORME, yet it was still super affordable. That insanely human-size focaccia was only 3£ or so! I don’t know why I didn’t buy one. I did buy a very large cream-filled chocolate king that lasted for several days. The donut pastry wasn’t as fluffy as it could have been, but it was still awesome! I wish this bakery was easier to find!

I also loved that there was a smoothie truck! SoulJuices made me a wonderful carrot, ginger, apple, spinach juice for £4, which is kind of pricey but I guess that’s London. The man who made it asked me my juice preferences (strong on the ginger, &c), which I appreciated. The truck also sold a delicious special smoothie of wheatgrass, spinach, mango, apple, and peach, which was insanely thick and smooth. And you couldn’t tell from it that wheatgrass is gross.

As for the vendors, many were outstanding! Even if your product is great, it takes more than that to have a good stall at a fest like this. You need samples, and you need lots of them. You need nice people, and you need to offer deals better than what you usually retail for. Let’s look at the vendors who succeeded.

Cocoa Feliz had the most beautiful table I’ve ever seen in a warehouse full of stalls. You could tell by how carefully they laid out every single chocolate that they cared about their product enough to devote real time and effort to its sale. The same cannot be said for many others. Anyway, the chocolate from Cocoa Feliz is awesome. They have crazy interesting flavors like cardamom & coffee and juniper & bay, and well as standards like peanut butter and mint fondant. They all come in dark, milky, or white options. I love that they provide all three types of each! It’s so nice! The chocolates were absolutely delicious.

Nakd bars did a great job as well. They had tons of samples, including new flavors like Christmas pudding (kind of weird). Even better, they had a fantastic 18 bars for £8 deal going on. This is the kind of basic fest behavior that other companies with similar products could learn from! We’ll get there.

OH WHERE DID YOU GO, GIANT WAGGON WHEEL WITH VEGAN MARSHMALLOWWWWS!

Another fantastic vendor was Goody Goody Stuff, makers of the most wonderful vegan gummies! The company’s representatives were so friendly and helpful, and they had bowls out of some of their wonderful gummies. They also were kind enough to share other products with me, and they were all fantastic! The summer peaches have a great flavor, but I actually liked the sour fruit salad the best. I usually hate sour things, but these are a little more sweet than sour, and it just works so well. And the texture is a little stronger, which I like. It’s hard to get the texture right without gelatin, but these are the closest I’ve had so far. I also loved the Koala gummy bears. Gummy bears are one of my favorite food groups, so I was so happy to find these. I’m so happy to be in a land of delicious vegan gummies.
I don’t have pictures because MASS CROWD but Sheese did a fantastic job! It made me really like the company and the cheeses. I was never a cheese person, but I could see myself buying Sheese.

Ananda Foods was selling several products (I didn’t see any discernible discount though, boo), mostly with their marshmallow stuff, including their incredible Round Up! Waggon Wheels. They are like Mallomars of my youth but with even more marshmallow. And they’re vegan! I’m such a fan. They did a giveaway for a giant (and I mean giant, like 15 inch diameter??) waggon wheel (I’m pretty sure it’s waggon with two g’s which I don’t like) and I lost. I am still distraught. If you see a giant vegan marshmallow cookie sandwich covered in chocolate for sale elsewhere, please get one for me k thx.

While Ananda had a great product but no samples or legit discounts (I mean I’m not mad), moo free chocolates shared their great product, good deals, and had ridiculously sized samples. They shared new holiday flavors and had the advent calendar for sale for only £4! (I should have gotten one; I’ve never had an advent calendar!) They also had buckets of broken up chocolate bars for you to try. I loved the people working this booth. They were so friendly and were like, ‘Hey did you try this flavor yet?’ and held up a bucket to me and I pulled out a ‘sample’ piece that was like 5 inches long. I couldn’t even finish it! And then I bought stuff from them, because that’s the point of nice people, good deals, and samples to know if you will like the product before you buy it. People. It’s easy. Moving on…

I think Vegusto had the most popular booth in the entire place, because they were selling their hot dogs and sausages on buns. They are sooo good! They had samples of their hard cheeses, which aren’t my favorite, but you couldn’t even get to them because the line for the food was so long. So worth it! They know how to sell their product and increase interest.

St Best patties

Rainforest Creations

Other great caterers were St Best Caribbean caterers, who had fantastic veggie-filled patties, and Rainforest Creations, whose raw and delicious food I always enjoy in Spitalfields market. Bangwok also had really popular pad thai that people said was great.
The always great Ms. Cupcake sold out on both days super quickly! So impressive!

I also really liked Jollyum ice cream. The lady who helped me was really nice and took time to answer questions. And the product was good too!
Aside from food, I loved the dishware from Magpie. How pretty is it?

While so much was good, I want to also talk about what was bad and what was worse. Yayyy judgment!!

THE BAD
Unfortunately, a lot of the caterers made food that did a disservice to the glory of so much vegan food. It was bland, tasteless, weird, not worth it. Boooo! There is so much delicious vegan food (that even I can make!) so there are no excuses.
First, unfortunately, was the much-anticipated food at Rupert Street’s truck. I have been looking forward to them for months, but this experience was disappointing. The corn tamale on a bed of grains and vegetables was so bland that it was like eating weird air.

I guess I was wrong to assume that tamales be filled with something? But this corn tamale was just a cylinder of corn masa. Like…it was all breading. There was no filling. Isn’t that weird??

It looks so good but it’s all so wrong. I’ll definitely try something else at Rupert Street to give them another chance, but I’m not looking forward to it.

Next up on my list of sadness was the Pani Puri Pops at The Hungry Gecko. The menu said they were ‘traditional Indian street food’. So that sounded promising enough.

So…I don’t know how people could eat this on the street. It was a cold cilantro-laden soup, and the ‘pop’s were little fried cups full of…air. It was so weird. VegFest caterers sponsored by weird air? I don’t know how people eat this without just breaking the fry cups into the soup and then eating it with a spoon. So weird, so disappointing.

Sadness soup pops

I was also super excited to try The Honest Carrot. I think I’ve had one of their famous ‘roast’ balls (above, right) long ago, and it was yummy and super healthy. I tried another one this time (the superfood roast ball) as well as the leek, squash, and butter bean mini pie. Honestly, I think this kind of food needs refrigeration or something. The pie crust was insanely soggy to the point where most of it looked and felt like injera. It was not delicious. The inside was pretty tasty but how do you eat a pie filling when the crust is inedible?? The superfood roast had a weird raw broccoli and cranberry taste, but it was better at home where I nuked it. Sigh.

The Primal Kitchen was there with unremarkable bars to taste, placed on rough wooden slabs so we got the whole caveman thing. The bars are all vegan, and they weren’t terrible, but I’m bothered that a company whose mission is to get people to eat meat, eggs, seafood, and their bars was at VegFest.
The next super sad table belonged to Fry’s Vegetarian. I’m sure most of us love their products, but they do not know how to present at a festival. They had 20% off their products, which is definitely awesome, but the table was just their products’ boxes, sitting there, doing nothing, no singing, no dancing. Like, who is going to be lured into buying something you can’t taste or even see? They had the saddest little sample trays as well, just a few cubes of the weirder meats as far as I could tell. Paltry showing for such a large company.

So sad

THE UGLY

What makes the following stuff ugly and not bad? Well, for starters, most of the products were actually delicious. Most of the companies are ones that I adore. What makes this ugly is the kind of interaction I had with them during VegFest. It hurts me that our encounters weren’t as great as their products, or as great as I had hoped. Some people, man.
First up, well let’s just start with the one that broke my heart the most. Vega.

I actually said to my friend Sarah, “Don’t let me leave without buying a bunch of Vega stuff!” I love Vega products, but it’s so expensive to buy in the UK. I was excited to buy some where there would be some sort of discount and where shipping wouldn’t be an issue. However, despite setting this reminder, I left on purpose without buying any. Why? Because the people (mostly the man) working the booth were super rude and uninterested in helping customers. I asked about the new bars that I had heard about (there weren’t any samples on Sunday so I was asking to make sure I got the right product), and he barely registered that he had heard me. His response? Walking away. There were no other potential customers around me, so that wasn’t the reason. And I’m a pretty damn polite person, so that wasn’t it. On Saturday too, when I passed by and asked about the products available and the discount (barely noticeable), this man was just as curmudgeonly and awful, so exhaustion from the weekend isn’t an excuse. I don’t really know why Vega, such a successful company, sent this man to deal with customers, but that was stupid. I walked away pissed, confused, and empty-handed. One or two awful reps won’t put me off Vega for good, but I’m happy using my Sunwarrior powders at the moment, thank you very much.

Next up! The ridiculousness of Organic Livity. The raw cakes looked delicious, and what I tried was indeed great. But, they don’t look or taste raw. I bought a raw Mexican chocolate brownie with mint cream icing. I was so excited! I love raw brownies and I love mint! But I am not convinced that the mint cream, which tasted exactly like the icing sugar- and margarine-filled frostings every nonraw baker (including myself) uses, was raw. However, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt on that one. (Even though some of the raw cakes looked like baked flour. I don’t know how on earth that stuff could have been raw. Unless, as my companion said, the ingredients were raw; the final product wasn’t. Love it.)

My friend and I joked that they were ‘free from treats’, as in, not treats at all, free from all semblance of treatiness.

See that cake in the back? How is that not cooked??

My real gripe is that it is such a superb waste of money for what you get. That brownie I got? For £2.50, I expected a regular sized brownie. Definitely not as big as the enormous donut (for the same price) from BFVB, but something at least visible. Nope. I watched as the guy carefully cut a tablespoon-sized piece for me, placed it carefully in a box, and handed it to me like it was made of gold, as my friend nearly pissed herself in disbelief. Rip. Off.

This is slightly bigger than my thumbnail, which I keep very short.

Lastly, my favorite encounter happened with The Chocolatier, this super fancy water ganache maker who sells to Michelin-starred restaurants, fancy businesses, and of course the Royal Family. The chocolate is outstanding (it better be for £10 per bar), and again I was so excited to buy some of the truffles, but nooooo.

Just to be clear, the slightly older lady working this booth (at least on Saturday) was the sweetest person ever. When you walked by, she stuck out little spoons of their ganache shots and smiled until you ate it. I love her. However, she wasn’t there when I was ready to buy on Sunday. A young woman, with what looked like professionally done makeup, who was probably my age but treated me like a child, was in charge. And my friend and I didn’t even have a chance to open our mouths before this girl regaled us with how fancy their usual clients are. This is almost verbatim: “We normally do business with Michelin restaurants and five-star hotels, and extremely high-profile private businesses. The rest of our clients are the Royal Family and other highly sophisticated people. We just loooooove doing this public events so that members of the public who normally wouldn’t be able to experience our services have this wonderful chance to experience something that normally only highly sophisticated people get to experience.” I guess I’m not highly sophisticated enough for her because I immediately vomited upon her. BARRRRRF.

I of course don’t want to leave on that vomitous note, so here are a few of my absolute favorite images from VegFest. Overall, it was a wonderful time, and the shitty aspects at least made it interesting.