Restaurants I've visited | Rohan's Rambles

UK

Giggling Squid
- Very cool interior, reasonable prices, vegan pad thai decent. Spring rolls not great
Gardi’s
- Excellent hot & crispy chips with fluffy insides. Hidden-away upstairs seating area. Radio 4 on; listened to Archers for first time in ages

Mallow
Vantra
Tofu Vegan
- Am a fan of most things on the menu¹
Mildred’s
Studio Gauthier
Taro Soho
- Very filling veg bento box, tasty too (£18 so a bit expensive though). Quite busy and one slightly rude waiter.
Dishoom
- Cool interior, food fine but nothing special for me
Itadakizen
- If I were in the area I’d go back, but not travel to it especially
  - There were a couple in the restaurant who said they go there (Kings Cross) from Harrow every week! I would run out of new things to try after my second visit, and I don’t love what they have, so that couldn’t be me
- Their aubergine dishes were impressively soft, almost melt-in-the-mouth
- I felt like the plates we had² should’ve been served hotter – many felt lukewarm / only a bit above room temperature. But maybe this is customary
- Portions somewhat small, came to £33pp for a filling three-ish course meal (sharing, no drinks except green tea)
Taste of Chongqing
- OK vegan options, works well for large groups (went for an EV meetup, with Fuchsia Dunlop ordering for us!)
Champor Champor
- Good range of vegan mains & starters. Some dishes were great, others (e.g. plantains, papaya) were meh
- Service mediocre and the restaurant has bad acoustics so very hard to hear: tables really packed together
- <2min from London Bridge station, so very convenient, but I reckon most of the time I’d go to Mallow instead

La Cucina
- Old-fashioned décor in a nice way; had a decent vegan menu
Chiang Mai Kitchen
- Surprisingly cheap mains, good veggie menu
The Gardeners Arms
- All veggie pub! Just quite out of the way
Hall at Merton
- come for lunch & get unlimited salad/fruit/bread/soup; early suppers are disappointing (though if you’re more likely to get a vegan dessert then than at lunch)
Edamame
- Seems overrated to me and I don’t get why people queue outside for 15-30min. Veg options fine but not spectacular, and portion sizes somewhat small for the price
Spiced Roots
- Two tasty vegan mains on the menu plus various starters. Quite liked the afrobeats(?) music playing too.
Thaikun
Pan Pan

Bululu Arepera
- Cheap and tasty, can leave out cheese and have veggie option with plantains + beans + avocado
P1 Bouche
- Vegan sandwich and nice tarts (courgette or tomato)
Gamine Bakeshop
- Didn’t have any specifically vegan things but made nice sandwiches to order
L’atelier sando
- Japanese rice bowls and sandwiches, good fried tofu
La cantine de Sam
- Filling salad bowl (“le healthy”)
Bloom Sushi
- Incredible – all vegan and delicious
- Pretty expensive though, was €60pp (for more than enough food)

The Butcher’s Son
- All vegan, very nice outdoor seating area. $15 for a sandwich feels expensive to me but it was filling (for a lunch, would be insufficient for dinner)
Thai Basil; Bear’s Ramen House (both in Durant Ave food court)
- Tasty, one meal is enough food for two days’ lunches. Have had aubergine & tofu at Thai place twice now
Blondie’s Pizza
- Vegan cheese is pretty good
Golden Lotus
- All vegan but would not recommend, slow service and food about average

Cha-Ya
- All-vegan Japanese place. Small sushi portion for the price but I had a nice tempura noodle soup (~$20)
Papalote
- Cheap, nice burritos. Several vegan options. Didn’t like the soyrizo much but tofu mole with refried beans was great. And you get nacho chips in the bag too!
Tiya
- All-vegan Indian. Very fancy and correspondingly expensive, lots of “experiences” on their tasting menu (which were nice & interesting). From n=1 outings, I feel like fine dining is overrated. But it’s not worse than a cheaper place so I guess people with the money might as well.
Wildseed
- All-vegan, absurdly priced $12 cookie but it was tasty & would return. Was interesting looking at the crowd there and trying to figure out what kinds of people they were (I didn’t manage to; I find it hard to place Americans socio-culturally)
Peacock Pansy
- Deliciously sugary & fat-laden French toast

Order from the most recent time I went: twice cooked fisc, wontons in special sauce, xiao long bao, special fried noodles (fairly standard), fried aubergine, sizzling tofu in special sauce, fried cauliflower (a bit too fried for me), black fungus spring rolls (too high pastry : fungus ratio so couldn’t taste it), sesame roll (again, too much pastry), pumpkin rice balls (not what I was expecting but tasty – hard outside, lotus paste(?) inside), brownie ↩︎
Our order: chapche, kansei han rice (definitely worth trying, more interesting than normal rice), toppogi, agebitashi, mapo tofu, nasu ju, tofu donburi (scrambled tofu was good but the rest was just like the sushi rice bowls I have at home, and not enough sauce for the rice), shoyu ramen, tonkotsu ramen (I didn’t try much of these but apparently the temperature was just right), matcha purin (yummy because of the fun texture even though I don’t really like matcha), apple pie (really an apple strudel, teeny but nice), mochi (just little moons, overpriced) ↩︎