Mani's

My other local lunch haunt from the office is Mani's, I can't really offer a deep insightful analysis as I've only ever tried their paninis (tomato and mozarella, goat's cheese), but there paninis are good and the staff are friendly.

They've got a good range of cakes, including a number of gluten free options, and their menu features some other veggie options that I'm keen to try.

This may be the most basic review, but I don't think Mani's has delusions of grandeur, it just gets things done well, the food tastes good, the coffee is nice, and I keep going back there!

Mani's Cafe

139 Sheen Lane

East Sheen

London
SW14 8LR

Tel: 0208 878 2858

Maoz

I've re-named West Hampstead; 'West Ham-n-eggs', because that's all there seems to be on the menu around there. A plethora of meat heavy restaurant and cafe menus made a spontaneous food adventure a little despondenet for two vegetarians. We ultimately settled upon going into an 'upmarket Wetherspoons' pub called The Lion, which had three veggie options (admittedly slightly more interesting than the usual gumpf) only to find out that they weren't serving food - at 2pm on a Sunday - for non-specific reasons for an unknown ammount of time. Frustrating, because a lot of tables around us were enjoying recently cooked meals. So, we left, got on a bus hoping to find a table at Mildred's in Soho, only to discover that they don't open on Sundays (again the curse of spontaneous quests), with tummys rumbling we ventured into Soho to a little vegetarian fast-food place I'd eaten at before (usually when drunk).

Maoz is very simple in so much as you get given a pitta with falafel in, you can pay a bit more and have avocado (as I did) or hummus (as Hannah did) and there are other options such as feta and boiled egg, or super meal combos, etc. We also went for some Belgian chips (chunky and crunchy) to warm us up on this chilly Winter's afternoon.

Once you're armed with your pitta pocket you prance around the salad bar stuffing in as much as is humanly possible; I'm personally keen on the red cabbage, some roast carrots, a bit of coleslaw-type stuff, a few gherkins, one chilli and a generous squirt of tahina sauce.

Then comes the tricky part, figuring out how to fit this in your mouth, which usually results in wimping out and picking away at the innards with a fork. It's simple, tasty, entirely veggie friendly and reasonably priced, especially if you're a cunning food-architect and can cram as much as I can into your pitta!

O.x

Maoz

43 Old Compton Street

Westminster

London W1D 6HG

020 7851 1586

http://www.maozusa.com/

Pizza GoGo

It's quite hard writing a vegetarian food blog when I'm extremely strapped for cash! I don't want this to de-evolve into a 'What I had for dinner...' column (Lord knows I've done that before), mainly because it would expose how repetitive my personal cookery is. I'm also holding off reviewing things like Waitrose's vegetarian sandwich range until I've at least reviewed one proper restaurant. But out of fear that this blog would just wither up and die I've decided to review something that I can technically class as 'eating out'.

I was very pleased to see that Pizza GoGo had included a new vegetarian pizza on their menu, it seems like a very rare occurence that an outlet that probably tailors to the beer and pizza crowd would introduce something that doesn't include slabs of meat, meat-stuffed crust and a beefamisu for pudding.

We're not dealing with pizza finery here though, their pizzas are good, tasty and come with two little tubs of sauce that help you get through those darker plain crust moments. Prior to the unveiling of this new pizza I've had two options; the basic vegetarian and the vegetarian hot which is the same pizza but with green chillies and jalapenos. This new beast is called a Tropical Vegetarian and scores points for including the two things I always ordered on my Pizza Hut 'make your own' pizza: pineapple and sweetcorn. This was usually met by scrunched up faces of disgust and confusion from my fellow diners. I've also recently succumbed to squirting BBQ sauce on my post-pub pizzas to give them a bit more, er, flavour perhaps... but Pizza GoGo have gone and read my thoughts by basically replacing their tomato sauce with barbeque sauce, genius!

The resultant pizza is a somewhat strange experience, the barbeque is somewhat overwhelming at times, but - I must admit - I was dropping these mouthfuls into a lake of beer, and my usual pizza consumption is either conducted in such a state of drunkeness or tiredness that I could probably be eating a shag carpet that, as long as it was coated in BBQ sauce, I'd throughly enjoy.

Anyway, well done Pizza GoGo for introducing a new veggie option! (Plain cheese and tomato doesn't count.)

Find your local Pizza GoGo and order online here: http://www.pizzagogo.co.uk/

Pickle & Rye

Lunch breaks are tough where I work, there's very little to choose from in the immediate vicinity, especially for a vegetarian.

Usually I plump for one of Waitrose's veggie sandwiches, or occasionally treat myself to a 'Pick Me' veggie microwave meal, fun times. There are a few cafes in the area but none really offer that much variety in the way of vegetarian munchings, I'll blog about them later, as I like to have the taste of whatever I'm writing about reasonably fresh on my lips (and stuck between my teeth).


Today I went to the Pickle & Rye, which I think is a recent addition to Sheen Lane's cafes. I'd eyeballed it curiously as I walked to and from the train station in the morning/evening, and so never got a glimpse of its menu until lunchtime today. It turns out the place is an 'American Sandwich Shop' and its range mainly comprises of meat-centric choices, perhaps if I was a bolder patron I'd try the ol' "What I want is..." and construct a sandwich of my own imaginings from the available ingriedients, but that's just not my style.

So, at the end of the list I find the two veggie options, one is egg, which usually falls into my 'if nothing else takes my fancy and I have no alternative source of food' camp, the other is called a Californian Club and comprises avocado, red peppers, carrots, mayo, feta, basil, olive oil on wheat bread. It comes with a pickle too! Unfortunately they were out of avocado, so I got extra pickle and a bit more veg chucked in for good measure.

The shop has only been open a short while and the staff are friendly, and the man sat outside eating his sandwich had nothing but compliments for the taste of his grub.

I took my triple-decked sandwich, gigantic home-pickled pickle and latte (£6.90 all told) back to the office and had a chomp.

Of the cafe sandwiches I've had in the East Sheen area this is the best, it knocks Mani's goat cheese and caramelised onion panini off its long-held perch at the local number one spot, so good going there folks. But, like Mani's the limited veggie options (especially of the take-back-to-the-office variety) are going to prove wearisome, so maybe some veggie specials in the future to keep things interesting?

However, it's a fine start for this nice new little shop, and if you're reading this and you eat meat then you'll have a wide variety of sandwiches to choose from, if you're me then one visit and you've experienced it all (except the egg one, which I'm not too keen to sample, but we'll see...)

O.x

Pickle & Rye
30 Sheen Lane
East Sheen
London SW14 8LW

0208 878 8982
pickleandrye@gmail.com

Hello there...

My name is Owain, I'm a vegetarian, I'll blog about the whys and hows and whos and whats of that some other time.

This post is just to say 'Hello' and to let the universe know that I'm going to write on here about going places and eating vegetarian food. Hopefully guiding other vegetarians towards good vegetarian food.

Now, I'm not looking for veggie-only places, and I shall name and 'shame' those that don't offer decent veggie options, and this'll probably just be a shambolic blog about nice sandwiches, but I review films and music and all manner of other bits and bobs, so why not veggie grub, it's something I face (and shove into my face) on a daily basis, so I feel like I have some sort of opinion on it and what is social media if not a place for me to carp on about things that nobody has any particular interest in hearing about...

Sorry...

Hope you enjoy the vblog (veggie-blog).

Owain. x