Thursday 11 October 2012

MoFo Post #8 222 Veggie Vegan

This dish was the winner!

This will probably be my last post about restaurants for a while. I have been eating out a lot in the last week! I had my real birthday dinner with my family at the weekend but a few people kept asking what I was doing in London for my birthday so I decided to have a kind of un-birthday meal mid-week with a few friends.

 222 Veggie Vegan had been highly recommended by my friend Dee. When we arrived we were surprised by how small the place is and it was very busy for a Wednesday night.
Only one waitress was serving the whole place which meant that it was quite a long wait for us to order drinks.
We were sitting on a long table, taking up about half of the table. There were five of us with one more to come mid way through the meal.

We ordered our starters. I had the Tofu and bean pancake which was really, really good. I always share my starters with Paul so that we can try two things so I also tried the artichoke hearts. They were cooked in a way that I hadn't tried artichokes before, it tasted like they were roasted in sun dried tomato puree, delicious.

Just after we finished our starters Dee arrived, thinking she was too late to order a main, she ordered a starter instead. We caught up with what Dee had been up to. The poor girl had just moved house after real nightmare with her flat share. The ordeal involved rodents, an untrained dog and a flea infestation. She didn't linger over the story and no one at our table or the adjoining table had food in front of them but the woman sitting next to us turned to her boyfriend in disgust and started talking about us behind her hand...subtle. This resulted in Dee reacting with even less subtlety. I suppose this is the kind of intimacy you get when you sit shoulder to shoulder with strangers in London restaurants. I didn't even notice them move tables as I was distracted by Dee's starter arriving so quickly.

Lindsay was embarrassed, not by the couple moving, but by the fact that Hanif's food had been sitting on the table all alone for 10 minutes and he was refusing to start until everyone's food was brought.

Along with everyone else, I urged him to start before it got cold but with hindsight, if he had eaten it he would have finished it way before anyone else got their food, which is never fun. It was quite a long wait. As we were waiting so long, Dee decided that she may as well order a main. I asked them to take Hanif's risotto away and bring it back warm with the rest of the food.

The best things come to those who wait?
A few minutes later everyone's food arrived, with Hanif and Dee's arriving shortly after.

I ordered an Oyster Mushroom Raclette with tofu cottage cheese. I found the term Raclette intriguing as I'd always seen the Raclette in Borough Market, which was a large piece of cheese near an electric grill, the cheese is scraped off while it's melting onto the potatoes. I think the word Raclette pertains to both the type of cheese and the method used, so I did wonder how this would work with a tofu cheese. Obviously they didn't use Raclette cheese and I'm not sure the tofu had been melted by an electric grill but it was very tasty, it did taste somewhat cheesy and the texture of the tofu cottage cheese was very authentic. Sometimes I'm just such a pedant (Always)!


Raclette
When it came to ordering dessert I shared a pancake with ice cream and unfortunately I was pretty disappointed. The pancake was overdone so it was difficult to cut and very dry and chewy. The custard on it was quite thin and not very chocolatey.

I'm sure I'd eat at Veggie Vegan again having really enjoyed my starters and main but the shortage of serving staff spoiled it a bit for us....saying that it was probably a good thing that we never got the waitress' attention to order that third bottle of wine or we may not be allowed back!


3 comments:

  1. That's such a shame, I've eaten a 222 a few times and loved the food but the service can be a little random!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Mostly the food was good, it was just my dessert that wasn't. I think they must have been really stretched. Some people were sitting down and waiting so long that they eventually gave up and left with out ordering.

      Delete
  2. I just want to say that Stef was an exemplary diner at the meal.

    ReplyDelete