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Eating Vegan in Moscow: Highs, Lows, and Our New Second Home

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​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.
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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! 
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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. 
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Yay chocolate and kale!
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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. 
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Ordering falafel: good. Ordering vegan onion rings: GOOOOOOD
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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. 

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. 
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green salad woohoo
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vegan pelmeni! I hope I find you again! oh woohoo
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another soup veg? lentil? hooray for soup woohoo
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fried tofu woohoo
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delicious but 40 minute late soup woohoo
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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! 
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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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