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!!!
awesome cupcake conveyer belt!
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