Camden Town Adventure

photo's (from top to bottom): Camden St, Inspiral, Inside the place, ditto, My choco mousse cake and butterscotch and lavender cashew ice cream, Camden Loch, Camden St #2, Strike Anywhere.

Last night I went into London for the first proper time ever. (I had been a few times before-but just to pass through). I caught the tube to to Camden Town, where the gig I went to see was on at Koko's. Spent a while walking around the 'edgy, alternative' stalls, haha and wandered into the first vegetarian (vegan! :D) cafe I saw. 

It was a place called Inspiral-a loungy place with dim lights and kind of ambient trance-dub music playing in the background. When you walk in, you see the 20 different flavours of vegan ice cream made out of cashews and agave nectar! Booja-booja style! They don't fry any foods and specialize in superfoods like raw cacoa, maca, wheatgrass, cama cama, and spirulina. A lot of the cakes and treats are raw. 

I ordered a chocolate mousse cake, with one scoop of Mulberry butterscotch ice cream and one scoop lavender ice cream, and a rice milk macchiato. I ended up regretting ordering what I did, but I just wanted to try it all. Girls will be girls!! It was all so creamy and super rich. The cake was amazing, it had a chocolatey cake base with a chocolatey velvety moussey top. I'm not the most hardcore chocolate lover though, so I can't fully explain my logic when I ordered it. I definitely would have been able to eat it all if I was PMSing!! :) Meeeoow!

The cashew ice cream was a tasty lick, but super dooper rich as well! And I'm not a rich lady! The lavender was daycent, personally I would have been a tad more subtle with the lavender-but I'm in no way complaining here, it was still good. Cashew ice cream is great but sometimes all the flavours start to taste the same. Am I right!!?

The place has loads of raw chocolates and truffles on the menu, as well as super healthy fresh juices. They also have some nice lookin salads, warm meals, and sandwiches. Everything is available for take away in eco friendly bio degradable containers with wooden cutlery.

Overall a bad assery of a find. Great place to relax and succumb to your sweet teeth. Agave nectar rules!!

Root Beer Float!!

photo's (from top to bottom): A&W Root Beer and Vanilla Swedish Glace mixed up for float, Johnny going straight for the ice cream, Brighton at night.

Freaking hell. Tonight is the best night ever, because after being in Europe over a year, I have found something I have been craving for the past year and never thought I would ever get on this continent...

....Root Beer!!!

Weird, because I never really drank it back home, (except at Christmas), but since it's not really available here, I've really missed it. I guess Thomas Haynes Bayly was right when he said, "Absence makes the heart grow fonder, Isle of Beauty, Fare thee well". Now you may be thinking , "Did she really just use that quote to reference soda?" Yup. Yes I did. 

I never once saw it when I was living In Ireland, or on my travels around Europe, so I was pleasantly surprised to find it tonight at the Taj Grocery Shop, just down the street from where I am staying in Brighton. I gave some to my South African friend Johnny, but he apparently doesn't share the same respect for the stuff, because he said it tasted like gross medicine. 

So what else did I do but make a Root Beer float! 

p.s. I threw in a pic of Brighton at night too just because it's pretty.

VBites!

photo's (from top to bottom): Hove Lagoon beach, VBites, Soya Nacho Burger (with tortilla chips and guacamole) and chips, burger close up n personal with the salsa I had to pay for!, Lime passionfruit and coconut cake with vanilla ice cream, cupcake conveyor belt!!, pretty cake, waiting for the bus!

Ok, ok. I know I have a lot of back dated travel posts I need to blog...but since today I made a trip to VBites, the ALL VEGAN restaurant in Hove (Brighton), U.K., I thought I should post my results!!

So I wasn't quite sure what to expect from VBites..but I didn't eat any breakfast or lunch because I wanted as much room in my belly as possible to fit lots of vegan stuff in there.. I walked 45 minutes along the beach from Brighton to Hove Lagoon, and when I got there at 2 o'clock I was just schtarving I tell ya!

The place is kind of slightly inconspicuous from the seafront, but I saw CAFE written across the roof of a building, and it turned out to be the right place. It's literally on the beachfront, next to a skatepark and windsurfing school, which in my opinion is brilliant. More about that later. The building is modest and used to be an old skool typical chipper. When you walk in it's pretty great though because there's two rooms, one with tables and one with a bar stool sort of set up WITH A CUPCAKE CONVEYOR BELT!!

The menu has breakfasts, appetizers, soups, sandwiches, salads, main meals, cakes, banana splits, coffees and other nice drinks. Oh yes, they also serve soft serve vegan ice cream! It's definitely not a posh place-more a fast food type, with burgers, hot dogs and chips. The menu is heavy on the soy products however, with loads of the items being referred to as say, 'beef' or 'chicken'...

I ordered the Soya Nacho burger (comes with tortilla chips and guacamole in it), and chips. The chips were amazing, and the burger was good. I think the actual patty could have been better, but I mean overall, it was a great meal. For dessert I ordered a Lime, coconut and passionfruit cake with vanilla ice cream, and it was so tasty! I was stuffed (and still am 7 hours later). The selection of cakes and cupcakes is good, with there being 6 different vegan cakes to choose from. The burger cost 6.50 and the cake n ice cream was 4.65, which I think is still o.k. for what you get. The only thing is they charged me an extra .75 cents for salsa for my burger without even asking me if I wanted it. Major no-no! Do restaurants do this just to get you to hate them?! Dicks!!

Overall, besides that I think it's a great vegan restaurant, slightly sterile maybe, and you can find much better vegan food in Brighton, but the staff were nice enough and the food was good for junk food! And everyone needs a lil junky now and then! It's in a great location-the only restaurant around the beach- because it brings in normal people who may have never tried a purposely vegan meal before. Yes, most of the menu over-does-it with the mock meat, but I think that's an easy thing most non vegans can associate with, and the more meat eaters eating vegan food, the better, right!?

VBites gets a star of approval from me, but mostly because of the soft serve ice cream machine and saweet cupcake conveyor belt!!!

Denmark

photo's (from top to bottom): Copenhagen at sunset, Christiania, Morgenstedet Vegetarian Kitchen, my dinner, Copenhagen from the round tower astronomical observatory.


In February I made a Scandinavian journey to Denmark and then to Iceland...

Denmark is amazing. Beautiful natural landscape, happy beautiful people, and amazing organization and transportation. Oh yes, and it houses the wonderful city of Copenhagen. A clean, easy to navigate city, with amazing bicycle roads everywhere (people cycle everywhere, and no matter the weather) wonderful cafes everywhere and beautiful people everywhere, with most of them speaking English perfectly. I found that the people were generally well-mannered and friendly when you ask them for directions or make small talk at the grocery shop.

It also has Freetown Christiania. The 34 hectare 850 resident commune, originally a squated military area in the 70's smack in the centre of the city...

I went to a nice little organic restaurant inside Christiania village called Morgenstedet Vegetarian Kitchen. I had soup and salad. I was nice, but not anything fancy. It was nourishing, tasted fine, and was organic so I was not complaining! I think my meal was about 60 Kroner, which works out to about just under 8 Euro. Cheap for Danish standards!

Danes tend to eat out less, with restaurants being rather expensive, meaning there's a limited amount of vegetarian restaurants in the country. The vegetarian movement is far behind those in other European countries, so if you go out for a meal, you'll often have explain veganism in detail, in order to get a truly vegan meal. They tend to eat a lot of fish, cheese and meat so it's definitely not an easy country to be catered for..Vegetarian items are far from always readily available in supermarkets, but there are health food shops selling veg food (they tend to often sell meat items in them a lot too-weird), so check them out if you're craving some tofu or vegan chocolate milk.

More vegetarian restaurants in Copenhagen: Den Grønne Kælder (Pilestræde 48), Det Eksotiske Hjørne (Jagtvej 127 Nørrebro), Ambrosias Have (Nordre Fasanvej 230), Cafe N (Blågårdsgade 17).

Dear you...

Dearest vegan warrior/blog snooper,

I love eating out, and I love traveling so I am making this, (my first blog! :D), to review vegetarian/vegan restaurants around the world....

If you somehow stumbled upon this blog, thanks for reading. I hope that it might help you to find some decent and healthy food when you travel and make vegan livin on the road a bit easier. 

Sloppy wet kisses, 

Carly.