Vegan tapas
Wanna know about the new vegan tapas restaurant taking Brighton by storm?
The very friendly Rob Trounce of rootcandi has put together the following guide to the restaurant and it sounds (and looks) incredibly inviting.
What is rootcandi?
rootcandi is the sister restaurant to Brighton’s veggie institution, Iydea. It’s a concept developed by the masterminds and chefs behind Iydea’s success, but it’s a very different beast altogether.
It’s all about showing the very best things that you can create with just plants, and then sharing those dishes with your friends and family. Food is served tapas style, and presented in a display stand. You are welcome to select individual dishes from the menu, but for the best experience we recommend going with a set.
We have three sets: Queens, Stanmer, and Preston. They’re named after areas in Brighton and Hove, and each is influenced by different regions and cuisines. The flavours, tastes, and textures within a set are all designed to complement each other.
Queens is a pan-Asian set. Favourite dishes include sushi stuffed with quinoa and beet brown rice, and glazed tofu on a bed of mooli, beetroot and wasabi cream.
The Stanmer is a Modern European set, featuring the likes of potato cakes stuffed with Vegusto cheese, pea purée and basil, and a broccoli and black olive risotto served with broccoli crumb, dumplings and crisps.
Finally, the Preston is inspired by South American cuisine. Risoles parcels served with re-fried bean purée, and zucchini fries with garlic and parsley mayonnaise are among the dishes here.
Oh, and 90% of the menu is gluten-free too!
Why tapas-style?
The tapas-style serving means that our chefs can demonstrate the very best things that they can do, whilst creating a meal that explores entire continents. Your typical restaurant has you sitting down to single plates of food, conversing with your friends over your individual dish. rootcandi is an experience: you pick and choose from an array of dishes and truly share your food with your dining partners.
Why plant-based?
When examining what we could do to make the world a better and more interesting place, we had to be frank. We are a restaurant, first and foremost. We are about the food.
Technically, we are a 100% vegan restaurant in the sense that our food is all vegan-friendly, but the term ‘vegan’ is semantically tricky – it carries different connotations for different people, from purely dietary to political motives.
We know that eating habits are on the brink of change, and that current dietary trends are not sustainable. We have to eat more plants and less animal products. rootcandi is a restaurant, and thus we are focused on food, but we recognise how the future of food might look. We wanted to dive in headfirst and really show what you can do with plants.
Thanks, Rob. The food being served up looks incredible.
Hopefully the restaurant will become more comfortable with the term ‘vegan’. If it is a politically-charged word, that’s all the more reason to use it.
Animals and the environment need all the political support they can get!
You can visit rootcandi online, like them on Facebook and follow them on Twitter or Instagram.
Please come to London. Please, please!!