Addis Ababa Cafe

Addis has long been a favourite of mine. I was originally introduced to it by Jean, who lives just around the corner but i suspect would travel miles for this food if she had to! it was my ex-partner's favourite, and one of the few places where he could eat meat and i could eat decent vegetarian. Decent is an understatement, this food is really really good. It has spice, without the burning heat of some indian or thai food. Vego choices: Misir Wett (red split lentils cooked in spicy berbere sauce - this one does have a kick to it!), Yekik Alicha (yellow split peas cooked with onion turmeric and herbs - my personal favourite), and Fosolia (beans with carrots, garlic, ginger and onion). All of these are served with injera - Ethiopian bread made with fermented rice flour that has the texture of a crumpet but big and flat for scooping up the lentils and veg with a delicious tang to it - but this can be an acquired taste, particularly as it's unexpected and not a taste often found in western diets; it reminds me of sourdough bread.

The restaurant is expanding it's catering for vegos and vegans with a monthly vego/vegan banquet. I went last month with kirrilly, jean and carol for a feast of seven exclusively vegan dishes with injeras for $25 each. You don't have to worry that it might not be vego - everything is. The restaurant was packed - this place has great word of mouth. You can get emails on upcoming banquets by joining the Addis Ababa group on Facebook. At the banquet, there were the three standard vego offerings, a spinach dish, another spicy berbere dish this time with veg, a cabbage and potato dish, and a green lentil dish with hints of cardamom spice. We got a huge take home bag - take your loosest pants with you, there's no shortage of food! No desserts, i don't think these are part of the ethiopian food culture, but ethiopian coffee or tea for afters is delicious.

Sign up for the banquet notices, or call the number below for info, and take your friends, this is truly a vego delight!

462 Port Road, West Hindmarsh, 8241 5185

Viva Sustainable Foods

Viva Sustainable Foods has recently opened on Magill Road, located within a growing cluster of organic and alternative coffee, hair and food shops. I came away so inspired. The shop has a selection of organic products, including unusual ones like organic Asian noodles, and all it's packaging is biodegradable, but it's the food that I'll go back for again and again. If I'd had a trolley with me to carry it all home, i would have bought even more, but as it was i almost put my shoulder out carrying what i did buy, i just couldn't stop! They have artisan and Beach Organics bread - i first came across Beach Organics at Willunga Markets, given that's a long way from where i live, i'm delighted they are branching out, i also saw their stall at the Rundle Street Markets a couple of weeks ago - the sourdough bread is hearty and thick and deliciously sour and wheaty. To have with it, i bought goats labne, which is made by the owner's father. This was undoubtedly the best thing i've ever eaten - little soft rounds of yoghourty cheese, rolled in herbs (with just a touch of mint, genius) and garlic olive oil - slathered on the beach organic bread was divine. I drizzled the oil over pasta the next day, so not a single drop of this fantastic flavour was lost. i also bought pumpkin and almond soup with caramelised onions to take home for lunch - lovely combo. The shop has a host of take home food - vegan and vegetarian as well as meat. The day i was there i was incredibly tempted by the vegan shepherds pie in individual roast capsicums - but weight and space issues prevailed! The shop has a long shared table in a room behind for eating in lunch and dinner. i haven't eaten in yet, but on the basis of what i've had so far, i would certainly recommend it. Or take plenty of carrying bags and strong arms and stock up!

Viva Sustainable Food store on 349 Magill Rd, St Morris SA 5068, opening Hours are 9am-5.30pm, Tues-Sat

T-Bar Tea Salon, Rundle Mall and Central Markets

To celebrate 'almost-spring' on Saturday (warm breeze, short sleeves, and that 'almost-spring' shift in the air, after a cold, wet winter), I had an iced tea from one of my favourite cafes in Adelaide, T-Bar. Green iced tea with lemon. Usually it has a smokey quality, or am I getting it confused with the black iced tea? Proper tea, anyway, not sugary, weak pretend-tea in a bottle. This is the good stuff. Okay, their vego options aren't extensive - a bap with pumpkin, feta, pesto, snow pea sprouts and sun-dried tomatos; and a falafel salad. If you're at the Rundle Mall shop, make sure you ask for the falafel salad to come with the green tossed salad and the cous cous salad, otherwise it's just lettuce, tomato and onion, though at the Central Market they do a good tossed salad with it already. But their tea selection is to die for. As are their Portuguese tarts - I adore these little flaky custard tarts, so much better than the stody bland bakery version - these are light and laced with cinnamon with a slightly caramelised top, and as Portuguese tarts go, these are far and away the best on offer in Adelaide. And if you're going, also try the green tea smoothie - slightly bitter, slightly sweet, and cold, fantastic in summer. Roll on warm weather!

You can check out their teas here
http://www.tbar.com.au/home

Chocolate Bean Cafe, Adelaide

The Chocolate Bean Cafe is a gorgeous space - a little bit bohemian, warm and welcoming, intimate yet with space for sitting alone and for looking outside for some street-gazing. And the food...They have yummy vegan cakes (so hard to find!) like the little chai cake piled with icing, or their choc and walnut cakes. Unfortunately, they don't have vegan savouries - though the vegetarian wrap will be vegan without the pesto. I don't often eat lunch here, I used to when I was a non-vego and worked on Grenfell Street at the East Terrace end, but these days I go mainly for the cakes and hot chocolates - all available with soy milk. However, I had lunch there last week with my friend Leanne, who is going through culture shock after moving to Adelaide from travelling for a long time, so I knew this would be a good way to introduce her to some of the lovelier parts of Adelaide. She had a toastie with the lot, I had the vegetarian wrap. The menu also has vego quiche and an avocado, tomato and cheese toastie (status of cheese unknown!).

Unfortunately the day we were there, there was a problem with the fire alarm going off. As we were sitting downstairs, rather than up, we were in amongst the noise and the traffic of new customers and the smells of toasting. If you go, get a table upstairs, it's more conducive to chatting and sipping. The vegie wrap is good - a little bit different from the usual fare with tomato, avocado, mushrooms, spanish onion, pesto and capsicum. But go there for the cakes and chocolate with a friend or by yourself with a good book for a space where you can sip and indulge as long as you like.

Chocolate Bean is on 18 Union Street Adelaide, ph: 8359 3399. You can excite your chocolate senses with their menu, which can be found at: http://www.chocolatebean.com/about.htm

Parisis at Magill

As a vegetarian, one is constantly called upon to account for this decision, particularly the boundaries of what one does and doesn’t eat. At a work lunch recently I had this conversation again. I told the story about how, when I first became a vegetarian, I borrowed another vegetarian’s pithy statement of what they will and won’t eat: ‘I don’t eat anything with a face’. But then someone gleefully, clearly thinking they’d ‘caught me out’ (I’ve discovered that lots of non-vegetarians love to do this, for example, by checking whether your shoes are leather, pointed out that this statement didn’t include shellfish, which I didn’t eat. So I changed my motto to ‘I don’t eat anything with a butt’. But, I’ve recently decided that what actually defines a vegetarian is someone engaged in continuous suspicious questioning of confused wait staff about whether their cheese is vegetarian. Yes, the perennial cheese issue arose again at Parisis, where I eat a lot given I live and work nearby.

Parisis has a fantastic Pasta Verde - spaghetti with peas, zucchini, broccoli, baby spinach, white wine, garlic and parmesan - it's aromatic and satisfying, beautifully green and garlicky. But the parmesan...I rang to order Pasta Verde takeaway for lunch for me and my friend Sarah (who loves this dish as much as I do), and asked the waitress whether the cheese contained animal rennet. She replied 'no', but, and this is perhaps a new measure of my cheese paranoia, it just didn't seem right. She quickly said that she'd just confirm that with the chef, yelled out to him, and Iheard the reply 'no'. Okay, it's pretty hard to get parmesan without animal rennet (if you're looking, try the sheep's milk pecorino at Say Cheese in the Central Market - they v. helpfully put a green sticker on all non-animal rennet cheeses). Unless I actually demand to go into the kitchen and look at the cheese myself, I fear I may never get a definitive answer to this question. And I'm getting increasingly tired of explaining animal rennet to people who work with food. Not that I did at Parisis, I just took the easy option and ordered it without cheese. And this is my new solution - no cheese. Lactose and I have always had a love/hate relationship anyway.

Do try the Pasta Verde - it's a green-vegetable lover's delight. And the Pizza Zucca (tomato, fetta, roast pumpkin, olives, mushrooms and pistachio nuts) is a refreshingly different vego pizza that tastes fantastic, though they also have the more traditional Vegetarian as well (tomato, bocconcini, artichoke, zucchini, eggplant, capsicum, spanish onion and olives). The status of the cheese is anyone's guess!

Parisis is at 613 Magill Road, Magill, ph: 8331884.

Nikitas Ouzeri

Well, I was a bit reluctant when I put up the 'T Chow' and 'Not Coffee' posts, because these were my first lukewarm review. However, it seems I've quickly come round to the idea of brutal honesty, justified in the name of good vego food (and good food generally) because this post is less than lukewarm! Dining at Nikitas starkly highlighted the vast difference between meat-eaters' and vegos' dining experiences. The people I was with enjoyed their meals and I know other people who've been here and had good things to say about it.

However, my meal was actually inedible.

First things first, the dips platter. This was good, though the fact that the dips were fridge temperature was offputting and blunted the flavour, particularly of the eggplant salad. There were five dips, and as I'd told the waiter I was vegetarian, he pointed out that 4 of the 5 choices were okay for me to eat, which is a pretty good vego ratio, one is often our lot. The stand outs were the feta cheese and olive dip, which was salty and creamy, and the garlic dip, which was beautifully garlicky.

There wasn't a single vegetarian main dish offered. Greek food can be heavily meat-oriented, but there are also divine Greek vego dishes (I know, I love Greek food and eat it often, see post on Argo's below), so I don't think it's inauthentic to include vego dishes on a Greek menu. As an alternative, I asked for the spanakopita entree to come as a main meal, and the waiter was very accommodating. However, it had clearly been re-heated in the microwave, and then put under a grill or in an oven for a few minutes, because only the top thin layer of pastry was slightly crisp, the rest soggy and claggy. The spinach was overcooked until it was dark and tasteless, even before its stint in the microwave, and the bottom was nauseatingly oily. This type of cooking is how spinach gets such a bad name, I took a few bites and left the rest - thankfully I ate a lot of dip beforehand. The sides were chips (yes, seriously) and 'salad', of the shredded-lettuce-and-chunk-of-tasteless-tomato genre.

There were only three tea choices, and only one non-caffeinated (not even peppermint) - I chose chamomile to try and settle my stomach.

Unfortunately, I can't even say good things about the ambience and decor. The restaurant was cold and the cake cabinet dark, creating a sense of emptiness, though there were four tables full of people. As well as the clearly refridgerated dips and tomatoes, from my table I could see a freezer stuffed full of frozen seafood, further compounding my sense that the food at this restaurant lacks freshness and the chefs are not passionate about good ingredients. The space lacked a sense of warmth and conviviality, and clearly there was little joy in the food or cooking.

If you're eating on Henley Beach Road, there are much better options (like the Abyssinian, for example) so do avoid this one.

Not Coffee

I'm not sure how I feel about including this cafe - I've only had one dish, though on the day I was there, the other vego choices included a pumpkin soup, a zucchini slice, and a vegetarian bap (Soft white bread is so ubiquitous these days, it really frustrates me, it's not just this cafe that attracts my ire over this. There are so many fantastic breads out there - for goodness sakes, be bold restauranteurs and give multigrain and sour dough a whirl!) I'm not sure if I want/need to be comprehensive in this blog - some restaurants I've been to I'm holding off on writing up until I've been there more times and had more of their selection of dishes. So think of this posting as a snippet, a little possibility, rather than a 'set in stone' assessment of the restaurant's menu (not that any of my other posts aim to that either!)

I had a vegetable and haloumi burger. But Uncle Albert's veg burger, (see post below) really raised the bar in the burger stakes. This burger was a toasted white roll, airy and nothing-y, which is why I don't like white bread generally, filled with roasted veges, mainly pumpkin and some zucchini, with reasonable flavour (though I would have liked there to be more caramelisation on the veg, they were a bit steamy, rather than browned) and some thin slices of melted haloumi cheese - it also would have been better with thicker slices of cheese. The burger came with a huge (and I mean huge!) serve of french fries, and a very nicely dressed salad. It's a big meal, and was reasonably priced, the cafe is light and airy, though the music was kind of loud, and the service was good. The cafe is also an art space, so there is some interesting art here too. As a choice for veg meals on Rundle Street (though Vego and Loving It will always win out here!) this is not a bad option. If you can't get to Albert's, but you need a burger, and you're with friends who don't want to go to a full vege restaurant, then head on in. My friend Kirrilly had the baked beans and egg on toast which was good - not vego though.