Eating All The Food

Or, The Great Brisbane Vegustation

I spent the last 5 days in Brisbane for a conference. My time in Brisbane began on Tuesday morning, catching up with a friend from undergrad, with a samosa and a rhubarb-apple crumble from Vege Rama in Myer Centre. It was much, much better than the conference food. But the obvious highlight of the trip was Saturday, which I spent with Susan, eating for about 8 solid hours.

Susan, clearly a woman after my own heart, is a planner - and had a rough itinerary of the best way to get the best of Brisbane's vegan offerings. Plus looking at pretty dresses and shoes. Here is allll the food we ate...

The day started at West End Markets, where we beelined to the ykillamoocow stall for vegan dagwood dogs.

While they were cooking up, we popped across to the fresh sugar cane juice stall. We both got our sugar cane juice with ginger and lime, and it was fantastic.

We had a little walk along the Brisbane River before heading to Paddington, where Green Edge is located. Green Edge is a vegan grocery store cross cafe. We met up with Amy for lunch (for her) and lemon cheesecake (for us).

And milkshakes. Unfortunately they were out of cookies, so my first choice Cookies&Cream milkshake was changed to chocolate, but I can't really complain because it was delicious.

From Green Edge, we went to Fortitude Valley and dropped in to Kuan Yin Tea House. This is where we overdid it a little. The real reason for being there was for Taro Milk Bubble Tea.

But since we were there we also got some Spicy Calamari.

Lots of batter, funny chewy calamari. Covered in plum salt, which was yum!

And Fried Dumplings.

We couldn't actually finish the dumplings because we were both starting to feel a little bit sick. But I took them away in a container and ate them later on, in the airport! The culprit was, most likely, the tapioca bubbles, though several versions of fried food certainly didn't help. So we walked through some shops in the Valley, clutching our food babies as we looked at Melissa shoes and tried on gorgeous dresses (a size bigger than usual, perhaps?).

We must have successfully walked off that feeling of I'm going to die if I eat another bite because we stopped at 5 Dogs and ordered a vegan hot dog to share, with saurkraut, vegan cheese, ketchup and mustard. This we took to New Farm Park where we ate overlooking the river, and about 5 different couples posing for wedding photos.

After sitting and digesting for a bit longer, we made our way to Loving Hut in Mt Gravatt. This was my first time at any Loving Hut, so it was pretty exciting to watch the Supreme Master talk about how she tried to save the people who used to live on Venus from destroying their planet. (Alas, she was unsuccessful.) Susan recommended three of her favourite dishes on the menu, but I decided to go with the Garlic Butter Cutlets, because I felt like European food, and she said a lot of people rave about them. We both ordered them, and were both pretty disappointed. They were salty, and oily (which shouldn't have been a surprise, really), but at least they came with a big pile of veggies and couscous.

I let some butter melt on the cutlets but about 80% was put to the side, and it was still too greasy.

After 5 courses, I left Brisbane feeling fully satisfied, happy to have made up for a few hungry days of conferencing. In hindsight, less fried food and less mock meat may have enabled us to eat much more, but I think we put in a pretty good effort!

The Vegg! Smoked Cheddar Sheese. BBQ tofu jerky (from an Asian grocery, not from Green Edge).
Primal Strips. White Chocolate.

The food didn't stop in Brisbane, though - I stocked up on a few things at the Green Edge.