vegan UK

Join FGV for a bubbly and cake party

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London. You are not just getting a few more vegan establishments opening lately.

You are being completely OVERRUN by some of the best vegan food outlets on the planet.

My friend Vanessa Almeida is opening her gorgeous vegan café in Shoreditch following on from years of running pop ups and residencies around the capital.

The lease is signed on the shop and I’m sitting inside right now as people paint furiously around me. It’s so thrilling to see Vanessa’s hard work and dedication to good vegan food finally paying off.

I’m working with Vanessa to raise some funds to ensure her Essential Vegan Café gets off to the best start possible. We are running a fundraising campaign to help pay for equipment costs, legal fees, paint, stock, furniture, and the countless expenses associated with opening a world class café in one of the most expensive cities on the planet.

If you think you have an idea of how expensive it is to open a business in London, I’d hazard a guess that your figure would be nowhere close to the reality.

I am trying to help Vanessa raise £30,000 to safeguard her business beyond opening. Most of the money is coming from Vanessa and her husband Neni, but they need a little bit of help from team vegan.

Essential Vegan Café is set in a stunning space just off Shoreditch High Street and it is the perfect location to showcase Vanessa’s Brazilian inspired menu that features seitan burgers, cheese bread and artisan coffee.

Of course there are a whole bunch of rewards on offer if you are able to support Vanessa’s campaign, but the one reward I’m most interested in telling you about today is the opening night party hosted by me!

If you donate £40 to the Essential Vegan Café fundraising campaign you can choose a ticket to the opening night party on Saturday September 30, 2017.

There are three separate sessions to join:

  • 6:00pm until 7:30pm
  • 7:30pm until 9:00pm
  • 9:00pm until 10:30pm

The ticket includes entry to the party where you will enjoy:

  • Free vegan bubbly to drink
  • A slice of cake (you get to choose from a selection!)
  • An Essential Vegan tote bag
  • Sneak preview of the café’s new menu before anyone else in London
  • 10% off your bill if you want to order food at the party

This is a very special event to help support a very special person. You will not meet anyone on the vegan scene who has worked as hard as Vanessa.

Join me for a party, eat some cake, drink some bubbles AND support an independent vegan business. It is going to be the MOST FUN.

Click here to see all of the rewards. If you can’t make the party launch, perhaps you will be tempted by some of the other rewards such as gourmet vegan cheese, private dining experiences and more.

Vegan cheese at Pizza Hut UK

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If you are a vegan on the Internet this week, you will have probably read the news regarding a vegan cheese trial taking place at some Pizza Hut locations in the UK.

Here are the basics.

Pizza Hut customers can visit a handful of restaurants between October 2nd until November 26th, 2017 and ask for their pizza to be made with vegan cheese.

The stores taking part in the trial are:

  • Pizza Hut CANTERBURY ​
  • Pizza Hut CRAWLEY
  • Pizza Hut THANET
  • Pizza Hut BLUEWATER
  • Pizza Hut CHATHAM

The vegan pizza options are limited to dine in only. No takeaway at the moment. It is also important to note that the gluten free base at Pizza Hut is not currently suitable for vegans. You can see all the other ingredients the company lists as vegan on their website by clicking here.

I wanted to give you a few more insights into how and why this trial came about, so I reached out to the person responsible.

Pedro Zúñiga is the founder of Coffee & Cheese, an incredible vegan cheese, vegan meat and coffee distribution company. I wrote about how you can buy bulk Violife from Pedro back here on my blog.

Pedro has singlehandedly manoeuvred this trial with Pizza Hut and is supplying the cheese through his company.

Here is what he had to say about the trial.

FGV: Which Violife product are you supplying for the Pizza Hut trial?

Pedro: They will use the new Violife Grated for Pizza we are introducing to all our customers in the next few days. We will have them available in 11x200g formats for shops and 1kg bags for caterers.

FGV: How excited are you? What positive effects it will have?

Pedro: From a personal point of view, I feel like this is a little step towards a more compassionate world, and it proves that even large non-vegan companies can no longer ignore the vegan community. Don’t get me wrong, I sill would much rather have a Protein Punch on a Turmeric base from PickyWops, but if your non-vegan friends or family happen to take you to Pizza Hut, it’s good to know that you have a vegan option there as well.

From a professional point of view, it shows that we are capable of making changes to large mainstream chains while keeping our vegan identity and being a small independent vegan company. This is encouraging for all independent vegan businesses, and reminds us that we can trigger changes even if we are small, and even more so if we work together and support each other. If we make our voices heard in this short trial period, they will roll out to a permanent, nationwide vegan cheese supply at all 330 Pizza Hut Restaurants in the UK. Takeaways aren’t involved yet, but this may also happen in the future if it goes well in the Restaurants.

You can show your support for Pedro’s hard work by visiting his website and following him on Facebook and Twitter.

Hackney Downs Vegan Market weekly

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You asked for it so we made it happen.

Hackney Downs Vegan Market is now a weekly event!

Fat Gay Vegan and EAT WORK ART are thrilled to announce the transformation of London’s best vegan street food market from a monthly event to a WEEKLY one.

There is no need to wait an agonising month to get your fill of delicious comfort food. Starting Saturday September 23rd, 2017 and going forward each and every Saturday, Hackney Downs Studios will be home to the finest collection of vegan traders in London.

Hackney Downs Vegan Market is the original and the best. It’s brought to you by a vegan in order to help vegan businesses. This is your weekly community market and entry is free.

Stay tuned for product giveaway news and updates taking place at the market.

FGV ice cream

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Here is a super quick post to let you know about one of the biggest honours of my life.

The Ice Shack vegan ice cream parlour in Manchester is serving a Fat Gay Vegan flavour!

The mojito flavour is packed with lime and is incredibly creamy.

Of course the FGV mojito is not the only reason to visit this ice cream shop, but it is a damn fine one. So is the salted caramel ice cream, the dozens of flavours of handmade truffles, and the ever rotating selection of ice creams.

Follow Ice Shack on Instagram.

Vegan waffles in London

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London, it’s your time to get Waffled.

Waffled tell me they are all about reinventing the waffle into a delicious savoury meal. That was enough to make me thrilled to book them for Hackney Downs Vegan Market this Saturday (September 16, 2017).

Who doesn’t love a good waffle?

Waffled products are mostly allergen free (they do contain contain tahini and garlic), 100% vegan and always gluten free.

The business serves 3 flavours of waffles which they turn into delicious dishes: 1) Falafel (chick peas + coriander) – they don’t deep fry the falafel, just waffle iron it 2) Buckwheat and rice flakes 3) Millet and oats (can also be made into a sweet option served with watermelon, banana barriers and organic maple syrup)

The waffles are complimented by 4 sauces/pastes guacamole made on the spot, aubergine-sweet pepper spicy sauce, home-made hummus, and beetroot-butter squash.

They also serve waffled vegan haloumi salad (made from drained tofu and marinated in a blend of spices making it taste like haloumi) garnished with pomegranate molasses and watermelon.

If you are excited about Waffled, give them a follow on Instagram and get along to Hackney Downs Vegan Market this Saturday.

Vegan pizza in Elephant

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I’ve been blogging lately about some of the vegan changes taking place at the shipping container complex known as The Artworks in Elephant & Castle.

There is Cupcakes & Shhht that has recently turned vegan, as well as an Ethiopian restaurant called Beza that has a vegan menu alongside its non-vegan menu.

To add to this vegan choice at The Artworks, I discovered today that the onsite pizza restaurant called Elephantastic Pizza has a whole bunch of vegan options for plant-based diners.

They even use Violife cheese for the vegan pizzas!

Check out my selection below and get along for good vegan eating in the Elephant soon.

Vegan with Shakespeare

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Vegan food is everywhere.

I’ve reported on fancy restaurants launching plant-based menus all over the planet. We’ve got more vegan fast food places in London than I could have imagined five years ago. Heck, I even dine in style on a 100% vegan cruise each year.

This saturation of vegan dining options leaves me feeling as though nothing could surprise me with plant-based developments.

I just found out I can be surprised.

You can now enjoy a three-course vegan meal in the rooftop restaurant or a vegan afternoon tea complete with scones, vegan hot dogs and croissants in the café of the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon.

Yes. Shakespeare just got vegan-friendly.

The most arguably famous theatre company on the planet now caters for vegans.

Afternoon tea sounds like a delight, especially when you consider the option for high tea featuring champagne and chocolate dipped fruit. You can click here to see the afternoon tea menu and check out the photos below.

The afternoon tea menu impresses, but the three-course vegan menu in the rooftop restaurant also caught my attention.

A thoughtful, high quality three-course meal for £26 in such a gorgeous setting is wonderful news. Click here to see the current menu items available for the three-course dining option.

The three-course dining option is a pre-theatre option and is served Monday until Saturday.

If you don’t know where the theatre company and restaurant are located, click here to get a better idea thanks to Google Maps.

OK. Now it’s time for your best Shakespeare-related vegan puns and jokes in the comments.

Extra note: all photos used for this blog were taken by Sara Beaumont of Sara Beaumont Photography.

Vegan friendly pub with food in Swansea

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Swansea. Your time has come.

The Last Resort is a contemporary drinking venue that is rapidly becoming the number one place where vegans and vegan-friendly people like to socialise in Swansea.

Carl from The Last Resort (located at 207 High Street) got in touch to let me know that the bar serves about a dozen craft beers on tap (all vegan) and that their food menu currently consists of the following:

  • Tofu-phish and chips
  • A southern fried seitan burger
  • Mac and ‘cheese’
  • Vegan scotch ‘egg’

The bar is super proud to serve up fairly monstrous portions and I’ve been hearing amazing reviews from their regulars.

You can follow The Last Resort on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Yay for vegan boozing in Swansea!

Follower drives on Instagram

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One form of support I’ve been involved with as a blogger and social media person recently is Follower Drives.

I got the idea a few days ago when I was visiting a brand new vegan restaurant in Sitges, Spain. Spice Garden is the only 100% vegan restaurant in Sitges and I was a bit disappointed that the Instagram account for the restaurant had quite a small number of followers.

During my meal, I posted a series of photos on my own Instagram asking my followers to consider following the restaurant. I set a target of 500 followers and if you click through to the account now, you will see that we were able to zoom right past that number.

The restaurant started with 187 followers and now has over 1,300 in just a matter of days.

I applied the same campaign idea to raising the follower count for a brand new late night vegan bar in Barcelona called Bar de Retro. This time we took them from 99 followers to over 1,200 in a day!

My latest Follower Drive is for a London vegan shoe store and ethical boutique called The Third Estate.

This store is exquisite but their Instagram account had been languishing around the 700 follower mark for a while. I set a target of 2,000 followers and we are almost there within 24 hours. I think they need just about 200 more.

Please get involved and get over to their profile.

I hope you can join me for more Follower Drives in the future. I think it is a great way to give independent vegan businesses a boost and help raise their online profiles.

Vegan thick shakes in London

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Holy shit.

I was strolling through Spitalfields Market in central London today and I got the thrill of my life when I saw this sign outside Leon.

Yes. Vegan thick shakes at a mainstream chain restaurant.

I rushed inside and quizzed the server (who turned out to be a vegan, too!) to find out the shakes are brand new, they are made with a cashew base, and they are only available in this one location of the chain.

I wanted the salted caramel flavour but it had sold out, so I went in for chocolate and Josh had the strawberry.

Check out this video to see the exciting process of one of our drinks being made.

This is serious, big time game-changing stuff for London. I mean, they have a freaking soft serve machine churning out cashew shakes!

Apparently this machine and the drinks are being trialled in this one location, so let us work hard on buying a whole bunch of them so they roll them out across all stores in the UK.