All posts tagged: toppost

#100 Vegan fine dining at Vanilla Black, London (UK)

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Restaurant review #100 – Reminder – GIVEAWAY to celebrate 100 restaurant reviews & 3 years The Bruges Vegan. Vanilla Black is a vegetarian restaurant in city center of London, near the Royal Courts of Justice. It is located in a small quiet alley. It is one of the more expensive vegetarian restaurants in London, and offers fine gastronomical dining. We telephoned to make a reservation for the same evening and that was no problem, although we had to be early (6PM all later hours were fully booked). We received a vegan menu card and also a vegan wine list. Nice! We ordered the 3 course vegan menu and could each choose different meals, even nicer! The 3 course dinner was £41,50. We started with a glass of champagne (drapier, £9,75). Water was £3,95, glass of wine was £9,75 (quite expensive drinks!). Here’s what we had for dinner. It was too much too take notes of all the ingredients, but every dish was very nice. Service was also very swift and friendly. Toilets downstairs were clean, although a bit unorderly. …

Vegan? So what do you eat? xx Photogallery xx

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So what do you eat? We do not get the question that often anymore, but still, some people have a hard time grasping what vegans eat. So what’s left after you take away the animal parts in a traditional dish, nothing right? Unfortunately, some people still seem to think that. Could not be further from the truth of course! It is about making new combinations and discovering new products. And several years after going vegan, we are still on a fascinating journey of discovery! In our minds, veganism is not about leaving things out, because we simply don’t regard animal products as ‘edible things’ anymore. In this post, I let the photos speak for themselves. It is a collection of photos of our homemade meals that I posted on Instagram (I will make a seperate blogpost with desserts soon). Most of the dishes are inspiration of the moment. Some are based on recipes from vegan cookbooks. We never considered ourselves as ‘foodies’, and I was actually quite surprised that a friend did refer to us as foodies the …

A word or two about restaurant reviews

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We have visited hundreds of restaurants over the years. And although we have only started this blog fairly recently (beginning of 2014) there are already quite a lot of posts with restaurant reviews on our blog. Here are some thoughts about restaurant reviews, and our take on the matter. #1. A restaurant review is always a subjective account A restaurant review is always a personal account. So many different subjective preferences shape the experience. As we explain in #2 we try to look at the global picture when writing a restaurant review, but even that is of course shaped by our own personal preferences and taste. #2. More than food: everything counts The food is of course the main focal point. A restaurant experience is however also shaped by other factors: comfort, hygiene, service, attitude, location, accessibility, choice of vegan options, presence of non-vegan items (like leather chairs in vegetarian restaurants), …  And a price tag that is in check with the quality. So sometimes the vegan food may have been great, but the restaurant scores less on other points (or …

Want some kale? Our 2015 veg harvest and lessons learned!

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Our garden has produced plenty of fruits and vegetables this year! I planned on putting together a quick blogpost with a collection of harvest photos that I have posted on Instagram the last couple of months. When looking up the photos of vegetables and fruits, it turns out I posted quite a few pics from our 2015 harvest! It’s quite the collection. And I don’t even take a pic of every harvest from the garden 😉 This is the evolution of the cabbages, from seeding – seedlings – to harvest! An overview of the fruits: And other things grown in our garden: Lessons learned: most pumpkins DO need a couple of square meters. so do not squeeze another plant in there, they will be too close together! 3 courgette plants (zucchinis) produces way more zucchinis than the two of us can handle 😀 cauliflower and romanescu are the more difficult cabbages. Brussels sprouts, red and savoy cabbage are relatively easy, kale is very easy to grow. thin the carrots in time, when they are still very small, or even, don’t seed them …

#57 Fabulous lunch at #HashtagFood in Bruges *****

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Restaurant review #57 – Hashtag Food opened in 2014. It is in the city center, about 5 minute walk from the main market square, close to the shopping street and just around the corner of Simon Stevinsquare. (Update: see below, new address since end 2017, now at edge of city) It’s a bright and very spacious place (they could have easily cramped in another half a dozen or so tables, but luckily they didn’t. Now you can breathe!). It looks hip and trendy! The table place mats are old records, which immediately gives you something to talk about 🙂 As do the names of the dishes! The menu is more bistro style (note that it also closes at 8PM). There are several vegan items standardly available, and some dishes that can easily be veganised. You can see the menu (in English) here. The chef did tell us that the menu changes every once in a while, and there would be a vegan pasta available soon. Both the waiter and the chef were very friendly and knowledgeable about what vegans means, which gave us …

#35 Our most recent visits to restaurant Réliva (3), Bruges *****

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Restaurant review #35 – Restaurant Réliva is one of the few restaurants in Bruges with vegan dishes standardly available. It is not a vegan restaurant, but there’s always a choice of two vegan main dishes and one whole vegan menu (35€ without drinks). We already blogged about our visits to Réliva when we first visited it at the end of 2013 here and our visit in 2014 here. (see edit below) Since then, we have dined four times at restaurant Réliva, on all but one occasion accompanied by friends or family. As restaurant Réliva also serves non-vegan menus, it is the ideal place to go to when you are in mixed company (with omnis). Here are some photos of what we had: You are always welcomed with a small appetizer, for example spicy hummus and kale soup, or on another occasion parsnip & kale soup and a mini spring roll. They now also explicitly state the bread to be vegan, which was sometimes overlooked in the beginning days. The vegan appetizer was either pumpkin soup or grilled sweet cauliflower …