Newer flavours in West End, Brisbane

 April 17-22, 2021

   

West End has long had one of the more veg-friendly restaurant strips in Brisbane. A quick browse of the Happy Cow map shows that it now has more vegan and vegetarian restaurants than ever before, in a higher concentration than any other Brisbane neighbourhood. Here are three of the all-vegetarian restaurants that we most appreciated during our short stay.

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You Came Again is a vegan bar, now occupying a shopfront that previously housed a Tibetan Momo Café. Though it looked small from the street we were led past the front room, through a corridor, and down the back stairs to a buzzing courtyard. You Came Again isn't sleek, but it is cool, evidence that West End is still home to a sub-culture of haphazard artworks and youths in second-hand clothes. The menu is medium-fancy and reasonably priced. It's more about vegetables than mock meats, though there's aqua faba meringue, mozzarella sticks and Kentucky-fried jackfruit on the menu. 

The centrepiece of our meal was the vegan cheese platter ($25), a gorgeous spread of cashew and coconut-based cheeses, olive tapenade and quince paste, apples, walnuts and Turkish bread. We also loved the harissa roasted carrots ($12), served on red pepper hummus and sprinkled with hazelnuts and pomegranate seeds.

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West End Vegan Restaurant is a Supreme Master-led business, with all the mock meat meals we've come to expect from Chinese restaurants in Australia. It's got something of a food court atmosphere and that suited us just fine for lunch. We were a little too ambitious: yuba drumsticks (3 for $7.50) to start, garlic 'beef' in black bean sauce ($16) for Michael, sweet and sour pork ($15) for me, and rice all round. Ordering from the 'rice dishes' page (rice, steamed vegetables and a feature dish for $15) would have been more sensible, but we really enjoyed the food and appreciated that they mixed in a decent serving of vegetables with the mock meats. 

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Vegeme was the perfect setting to grab an early weeknight dinner with some friends and their young kids. The menu was well labelled, had lots of fun smaller dishes for the kids to graze on (edamame, okonomiyaki, spring rolls) and larger rice and noodle-centred dishes for the larger appetites. I ordered out of character - my body was telling me I needed less fried food and more vegetables - and a $12.50 satay noodle soup sounded modest but tasty. It was a good order - lots of veges, a smattering of tofu and soy protein, plenty of noodles, and a hot flavoursome broth - but it was also enormous. It both nourished and defeated me.

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This is but a sampler of the great foods that West End has to offer. There were too few meals in the day to visit every restaurant and café that interested us, and our stay wasn't timed right to hang out at the Davies Park Market or the Brisbane Vegan Market. Regardless, it's lovely to see a thriving veg scene for the local community.