Shift Eatery & Green Mushroom

December 1 & 3, 2017

I arrived in Sydney just in time to meet up with Cindy for lunch at Shift Eatery, Sydney's answer to Smith and Deli. It's more a sit-down place than S & D, but the menu is working similar territory - lots of sandwiches and toasties, plus some salads and a cabinet full of sweets. It's all vegan and it's pretty popular, we were lucky to sneak a table before the lunchtime rush hit.

Cindy ordered the 'nothing fishy' sandwich ($12), made from chickpea and artichoke 'tuna', with house made aoili, greens and tomato. Cindy described it as a healthy version of Smith and Deli's Free Willy 2, which is a bit of a back-handed compliment (it probably didn't help that she filled up on her chilled iced chocolate with macadamia milk and 50% cocoa chocolate, $5). I ordered the 'Reuben's brother, Steve', a combo of corned beef, sauerkraut, Russian dressing, cheddar cheese and gherkins ($16). I was very impressed with this - loads of mock meat piled up with great accompaniments and toasted to perfection.

We took a couple of Treat Dreams sweets away for later and they were brilliant - their chocolate bars are available from Cruelty Free Shops we're keeping an eye out for a Melbourne pop-up soon.

We were enthusiastic enough to head back to grab a wrapped lunch on our way to the airport. We decided that untoasted sandwiches were the most likely to travel well, so I grabbed the smoked tofu (minus the pineapple, but with greens, slaw, lime tahini sauce, tomato, chipotle and mix sprouts, $14) and Cindy picked up the 'join the club' - chicken schnitzel, turkey slices, cheddar cheese, lettuce, tomato, avocado and house made aioli ($16).

These were both spectacular. Shift are really delivering some solid Sydney lunches. It'll be a regular stop on our future Sydney jaunts.

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We headed to Glebe for dinner, following some Twitter advice to check out Green Mushroom, an all-vegan Indian restaurant. We were a bit overwhelmed by the menu, which ran to something like 8 pages and spanned all manner of classic Indian dishes along with a couple of random pasta options. We were tempted by the mock lamb options and the palak tofu, but in the end had to restrain ourselves to just a couple of dishes.

We combined the eggplant and potato masala ($18.95) with a veggie and tofu biryani ($16.95) and a serve of the excellent vegan garlic naan ($3.50). The eggplant and potato dish was wonderful, with the eggplant surprisingly out-shining the potato. The biryani had a good spicy kick and a nice mix of veggies and tofu throughout. 

Prices seem a little bit excessive for Indian food, but the portions are generous (we couldn't eat all of this between the two of us) and the service was great. It'd be a fun place to take a big group to - there are so many dishes to try! It's pretty ace to have an Indian restaurant where vegans don't have to worry about ghee sneaking into things too.

It was great to check out a couple of new (to us anyway) all-vegan places in Sydney. They'll likely make it onto our repeat-visit list... that's coming up in our final Sydney post.