You have probably seen the videos and headlines doing the rounds about the ‘protesters’ showing up outside vegan events and restaurants to eat raw meat.
They most infamously targeted VegfestUK Brighton by trying to distress attendees at the entrance. Their whole routine is to chew on dead animals in order to upset vegans. Their actions are grotesque but weirdly counterproductive as many non-vegans are equally repulsed and therefore engaged in thinking about animal cruelty.
Essential Vegan Cafe in Shoreditch, London was recently targeted by these anti-vegan trolls so I’ve created a Facebook event in order to unite the vegan community in an act of support for the business.
PLEDGE TO VISIT Essential Vegan Café AT LEAST ONCE BEFORE AUGUST 31, 2019
These trolls have been attempting to disrupt vegan businesses by chewing on raw animal carcasses and saying provocative statements about vegans being unhealthy and mentally ill.
During April 2019, these antagonists entered the Essential Vegan Café in Shoreditch. Some of them were carrying and chewing on animal bodies. If you wish to see the full video filmed and shared by the anti-vegan trolls, you can visit YouTube. It is graphic.
Following on from the invasion of the café, the trolls and their supporters waged a campaign of intimidation and slander against the café including leaving fake negative reviews online and prank calling the premises.
This is our chance to fight back against these absurd and harmful attacks. We are pledging to come together as a community of kind people in order to help Essential Vegan Café thrive and prosper in the aftermath of this attack on their business.
By RSVPing to this Facebook event, you are promising to visit and eat with Essential Vegan Café at least once before the end of August 2019.
By working together as a collective, we are ensuring the financial security of this unique and special vegan business. We will redress any damage done by these trolls. We will make the café an even stronger and beloved space than it already is.
RSVP now to pledge to visit Essential Vegan. Use the ‘invite’ function to tell all your friends to join the fight. Share the Facebook event far and wide. If you don’t use Facebook, share this blog post and visit the café anyway.
And be sure to post all your gorgeous food photos in the Facebook event when you do visit!
The Gallery Café of Bethnal Green invites you to a special Dinner in the Garden.
On Wednesday May 22, 2019 you can enjoy a buffet of delicious vegan food and a chance to relax for an evening in their beautiful garden, which is usually only open on the weekend.
I can speak to the gorgeousness of their private garden. It was the location of the first ever London Vegan Beer Fest and is the perfect blend of tranquil, green, and relaxing.
Following on from their Vegan Celebration in January, the 100% vegan café received so many enquiries as to when they would be hosting another food event. They decided there isn’t any better way to celebrate spring than a gorgeous meal outdoors!
The Gallery Café chefs are already busy preparing a delectable set of bites not seen on their regular daily menu. As well as access to the buffet, each ticket holder will receive a free drink and automatic entry into their raffle to win a St. Margaret’s House hamper.
Click here to order your tickets now for just £18. I expect this is going to be a wildly popular event so act quickly.
Copperhouse Chocolate has launched as a vegan chocolate shop and cafe this April!
For the past decade, hot-chocolatier and founder Juliet has hand crafted award-winning chocolate drinks and treats to excite chocolate lovers from all over the world.
As a vegan of 20 years, Juliet has tried to make sure these have generally been plant-based.
With the changes in the London vegan scene in the last couple of years and greater understanding of plant-based diets, the time has come to stop compromising by offering drinks with dairy – the new brand is entirely vegan!
The chocolate shop and cafe is centred around a unique collection of hot chocolates. Single-origin hot chocolates from Colombia, Madagascar and Ecuador have their own distinct tastes. For the range of flavoured hot chocolates, fruits and spices are combined to create flavours including Chilli con choccy, Raspberry Dream, Mintchievous. The award-winning recipes are made with only the finest ingredients, which have been carefully selected for their optimum quality, unique sweetness, and traceability to support social consciousness.
The hot chocolates and nut cups are all made onsite, with a window to the production kitchen offering an exclusive glimpse of the vast pools of melting chocolate being prepared. These are also sold in independent coffee shops around the UK – café owners and retail curators rely on us to ensure that their chocolate tastes as good as the coffee served in their shops.
To accompany the drinks, cakes are all made in house. All with a chocolate twist, banana bread with cocoa nibs can also be upgraded with yoghurt, fruit and chocolate sauce for brunch. Chocolate coconut tart is made with a raw almond base and filled with ganache while chunky cookies are free on Friday afternoons during chocolate happy hour.
The chocolate-inspired brunch menu includes savoury cornbread waffles topped with Mexican- style black bean chilli in mole sauce, healthy chocolate avocado smoothie bowls and indulgent orange-zest Jaffa pancakes drizzled with marmalade-maple syrup and chocolate sauce. Waffles can be customised with choice of toppings – choose to make it a dessert with ice cream and caramel sauce, or breakfast topped with fruit and nuts, all with added chocolate sauce.
Alongisde the retail packets of hot chocolate and chocolates made onsite, the shop area features a carefully curated lineup of bean-to-bar products by expert chocolate makers including Marou, Duffy’s and vegan white chocolate bars from Solkiki.
Located just moments away from Angel tube station, Copperhouse Chocolate promises a welcoming cosy space to relax with a comforting cup of proper hot chocolate, and offers a home for community groups, meetups, and gatherings to connect in London.
London Vegan Beer Fest was created back in 2013 because the UK capital didn’t have a lot of large scale socialising events targeted just at vegans. Actually, outside of events such as VegfestUK and the Animal Aid Fayre, there weren’t many ways I can recall to celebrate with a vegan beer in your hand.
Following on from a visit to the original Los Angeles Vegan Beer Festival (created and run by Nic Adler and Quarrygirl), I was inspired to create something similar for London that was completely plant-based and focussed around beer.
It started as a small garden party in Bethnal Green for 200 people and over the next six years grew into one of London’s biggest annual vegan parties, welcoming thousands of revellers.
In addition, Vegan Beer Fest UK events were launched in Manchester, Glasgow, Sheffield, and Coventry.
But here we are in 2019 and the vegan landscape has changed drastically. No longer is a moderately-sized vegan event with curated food, beer, and wine offerings such a unique occurrence.
Just as Hackney Downs Vegan Market found itself unwanted due to the mainstreaming of veganism, Vegan Beer Fest UK events started to feel a bit superfluous in the current climate.
People can buy vegan beer in every single shop, supermarket, and pub in the country while High Street restaurants have made veganism more than normal and common. Large scale music festivals are even showcasing entire vegan food and drink sections.
Josh and I are extremely proud of the events we put together and hosted over the past six years and are sad to be wrapping them up, but it is important to be realistic about how the climate for these types of events has changed.
Vegan Beer Fest UK events are not planned for 2019. Who knows? Maybe you will see them return in a different format in the future.
Josh and I would like to personally thank a number of people who helped make these events fun and valuable community happenings over the past half decade.
Much love to the businesses, breweries, and food traders who traded with our events around the UK. Some of you travelled great distances to be a part of these special days and all of you worked tirelessly to prove that veganism does not mean something substandard.
We have eternal gratitude to our host venues. Thank you for taking a chance on us and giving our little vegan beer events safe and special homes over the years.
I can’t express how important the people are who helped us stage and run the events. Some of you were paid and some of you helped simply out of the goodness of your hearts. All of you understood the value these events added to our community. Thank you.
Follow Your Heart has been associated with our events for several years and this California company specialising in vegan cheeses and salad dressings (including the legendary Vegenaise) made our events possible financially. If you saw some of the margins we were running on most years, you wouldn’t underestimate the importance of Follow Your Heart‘s support. We send all of our love and gratitude to them. They are a big company that truly cares.
I send personal and heartfelt thanks to my dear friend Ricardo who has worked on the event design and posters for several years. He is an extremely talented designer and helped us forge a unique personality for Vegan Beer Fest UK events. His ideas will live on in the hundreds of t-shirts and tote bags bought by attendees during the last few years.
These events would have been impossible without all of the wonderful people who attended each year. Thank you for supporting us and for partying alongside us. You drank beer, you devoured street food, and you helped us raise approximately £1,000 for our featured charity Isla Urbana (securing clean and safe water for people in Mexico) through our Charioke rooms at the beer events. We couldn’t drag people away from those amazing charity karaoke sessions!
Lastly, I want to state just how grateful I am to Josh for the support he showed my initial idea of launching a beer festival. In addition, he needs to be thanked for the ridiculous amount of work he put into making these events happen each year. There were early mornings, long days, car journeys from one end of the UK to the other to meet deadlines, karaoke hosting duties, clean ups, stall building tasks, door and ticket collecting duties, and probably about two dozen more jobs that I can’t recall.
Honestly, running these events on our own was emotionally and physically challenging like few experiences I’ve had.
Josh did them all alongside me because he believed, as I did, that we were making special places for people to feel celebrated in their vegan lifestyle.
Vegan Beer Fest UK events were our way of helping to improve outcomes for non-human animals by making people feel good about their compassionate choices.
I look to the future with memories of these events firmly and fondly in my heart.
Dappa is a vegan soft serve ice cream company currently taking London by storm.
Not only have they announced a fabulous Summer residency in the capital, but they are giving away 100 free ice creams on Saturday April 20, 2019 t0 celebrate.
The residency kicks off this weekend inside Sourced Market, which is located inside St Pancras Station. They start serving from midday and will be there each week until the end of Summer from Tuesday through Sunday.
To celebrate their opening, they are giving their Instagram followers a chance to nab a free ice cream.
All of the details on how to claim your ice cream are contained in this Instagram post.
Thanks to a huge stroke of luck, I was able to win a pair of tickets for the FA Cup Semi Final to watch Manchester City v Brighton & Hove at Wembley Stadium this weekend. As an added bonus, these tickets were for the Bobby Moore Club level and came with the full corporate hospitality package which is something I’ve never dreamed of experiencing before.
We submitted our dietary requirements in advance and Wembley Stadium confirmed this was all in hand. I had no further information about the food ahead of time, but hoped for the best and knew that if it was terrible we could always buy some tasty Indian food from nearby Ealing Road after the game. Online reviews rave about the hospitality experience and I couldn’t wait to try it out for myself.
Upon arrival, we were warmly greeted at the bag search before heading to the turnstiles and into Wembley Stadium. After our tickets were scanned, we were welcomed into the Bobby Moore Club by a team of well-polished and friendly staff who were waiting to receive us. They quickly matched up our ticket numbers with a table booking and a hostess took us across the restaurant to our own private table. A waiter was ready to receive us at the table, pulled our chairs out and offered us a glass of champagne.
After our glasses were filled, he said “May I just confirm that you are our vegan guests?”. We said yes and he handed us our menu for the day.
I wasn’t really sure what to expect, but this was instantly impressive. A 5-course fully vegan fine dining menu packed with delicious and inventive things; no portobello mushroom burgers in sight!
A bowl of olives and a bowl of luxury mixed nuts were already on the table so we placed our order for the meal and got started on the nibbles while we waited.
We were then offered a bread selection and our waiter kindly brought over an allergen sheet for us to check before we ate anything. The bread was produced in a bakery which also handles dairy so he alerted us to the possibility of traces, but dairy wasn’t used as an ingredient in the bread so that was perfectly fine for us. Instead of butter, we enjoyed the bread with olive oil and balsamic vinegar.
The restaurant was slowly filling up but there was no dip at all in the impeccably high levels of service. Our drinks were topped up and the starter arrived.
As a lifelong soup fan, I was guaranteed to love this course but it was even better than I anticipated. Delicately flavoured, the perfect texture and topped with a few baby pea shoots, this was a fantastic way start to the meal.
The main course followed and it was easy to see how much care had gone into the careful plating of this meal. The colours really popped and made the whole thing look so instantly appetizing.
The amount of flavour in the roasted and pureed vegetables was absolutely amazing. At first the portion seemed on the small side, but it was deceptively filling and beautifully done.
Dessert wasn’t groundbreaking at all, but it was still fresh and delicious.
It would have been lovely to have a slightly more inventive vegan dessert than a fruit salad. I wasn’t expecting an aquafaba meringue, but maybe a fruit crumble, a flapjack, some coconut yoghurt, or even some vegan ice cream which is readily available in our supermarkets these days.
After the first three courses were over, it was time for tea and coffee before heading out to our seats to watch the game. At halftime we headed back inside the Bobby Moore Club restaurant and the halftime snacks awaited us. We each had a plate with a falafel, some fresh vegetables and a pot of hummus to dunk them all in.
We headed back to our outdoor seats and watched the second half of the game, Manchester City were victorious with a final score of 1 – 0. It wasn’t over for us though as we headed back to the restaurant one final time to enjoy our post-game cheeseboard and one more drink before hitting the road.
I had been dubious about the cheese as we know that all vegan cheeses are not created equal. But this one was something special! It was really rich and delicious, but not overpowering at all. I didn’t ask but if I had to guess I’d say it was cashew-based. Either way, we absolutely loved it.
And just like that, our hospitality experience was over. It isn’t something I could have done without being lucky enough to win tickets but it was an incredible day and I enjoyed every minute. It was also impressive to see such excellent vegan options being offered in a place where the average guest isn’t a vegan. Top marks to Wembley Stadium and the Bobby Moore Club!
Sassy Plants (formally That Sloppy Vegan) are having another pop up event in South London this month!
The second supper club is taking place in Balham on Friday April 12, 2019 at Brother Marcus located at 9 Chestnut Grove, London SW12 8JA.
The dinner will run between 7:30pm and 10:00pm.
Wanna know about the menu?
Enjoy a middle eastern inspired, totally vegan dinner. Sassy Plants is all about promoting incredible flavour within an entirely plant-based menu for vegans and non-vegans alike.
Four courses will be accompanied by great music and the awesome atmosphere of Brother Marcus.
Check out the sample menu below:
Appetiser – Selection of Meze
Starter – Kofta with Twisted Tabbouleh and Smoked Sauce
Main – Ras-el-Hanout Grilled Aubergine on Mushroom Infused Buckwheat & Pearl Barley with Seasonal Vegetables
Dessert – Warming Apple Tart with Cardamom Infused Vanilla Cream
Hospital food has had a bad reputation for decades. Never mind vegan hospital food, which I’ve never had to try and find before now. I recently had an operation which required an overnight stay in a London hospital. Ahead of time I contacted the hospital to put in my request for vegan meals and hoped for the best.
They confirmed vegan meals would be provided for me but couldn’t give me exact details of what would be available. I had the lowest of expectations and asked my loved ones to be on standby to source a packed lunch from outside if needed!
The day came, the operation was a success and this was my post-op meal, a combination of lunch and dinner due to the timings on the day.
They brought me round a jacket potato with double beans, a hummus sandwich on brown bread with crisps and a side salad. Dessert was a fruit bowl with melon, grapes and pineapple pieces. I was impressed! Nothing here was groundbreaking but it was thoughtfully put-together, healthy, tasty and filling.
Even my visitors were impressed! Though perhaps this was because there was no need for anyone to do an emergency dash to the nearest food retailer.
The real fun came the next morning when breakfast arrived. They brought me avocado on sourdough toast, a large bowl of porridge with maple syrup, another round of toast with peanut butter and another fruit bowl.
It’s one of the best breakfasts I’ve ever had, which was extra welcome in the circumstances!
The team behind Black Cat, Hackney’s oldest and arguably finest vegan café, have taken over the kitchen at Roadtrip & The Workshop.
Although London can luckily claim a few vegan pubs, this is the first time a bar, and a late night one at that, is catering a fully plant-based menu. (FGV note: I might argue that Karamel in Wood Green is the first)
The aim is to offer approachable vegan food to the multifaceted clientele of the Old Street location, from gig-goers to the followers of sports on the big screens to those looking for a meal to go with their night out in Shoreditch.
Black Cat will be serving up “tapas without borders”, a menu combining vegan versions of traditionally Mediterranean dishes with hints from other parts of the world.
The menu has been tested and served at their Hackney premises, and some have even been served at benefit gigs, music venues, gatherings, and special events.
Regulars to Black Cat need not be disappointed on their first jaunt to Roadtrip & The Workshop: Black Cat’s burgers will be also available and new dishes will appear weekly on the specials board.
Prices range from £3 for freshly-cut chips to £8.50 for the delicious cashew buttermilk corn-crusted seitan burger. The small sharing plates average around £6.
This will be the first vegan residency at Roadtrip & The Workshop, and the venue has gone to great lengths to ensure that diners can not only eat plant-based foods, but that the drinks menu matches the ethics behind the food!
All wine and beers behind the bar are vegan, as is most of the cocktail menu, which is clearly labelled while the venue works with existing suppliers and brands to clarify and find alternatives for its full back-bar of spirits and liqueurs.
Black Cat’s head chef, Nacho, commented: “We’re delighted to be able to bring our food to Old Street, and the whole team are excited to reach as many people as possible to highlight how going out eating vegan is affordable, easy, and most importantly, it can be enjoyed by anyone!”
Carla, who manages the café with Nacho, added: “We’ve been on the lookout for a second site for Black Cat, and when Paul from Roadtrip & The Workshop got in touch, we knew this was the perfect place to bring our tapas menu to. We are super excited and thankful for this opportunity given to us by the venue.”
Both Black Cat venues will be open simultaneously and can be booked for large parties, birthdays, or other celebrations.
