Relae, Copenhagen

We visited Copenhagen a week ago. A week or so before, we came across an article on top food destinations, checked out the recommended restaurants in Copenhagen, found that Relae does a vegetarian menu, and spontaneously booked a table online. Well actually, I had to apply some dedication and luck - we initially signed up to a waitlist, I checked the booking website some time after, found a dinnertime table free, and grabbed it. We never heard back from the waitlist, and I never saw another free table before or since, so what luck indeed. They are only open four nights (and two lunchtimes) a week, which goes some way to explaining the challenge.

Our booking was for our first night there (the only time they'd be open during our trip). So we were somewhat bleary from timezone crossing when we wandered in their direction. But sunshine overcame that weariness, with green spaces and bike buckets full of merry Danes. Relae is on a very lively street, amid shops of beautiful ceramics, interesting clothes, good coffee and so forth. Seems like a hip hood. We wandered a while before we reached our booking time and settled in.

Space was a touch cramped - passing between our table and the adjoining two person table almost impossible. But each table was a magic box - menus and cutlery hidden in a drawer. So when we sat the table was empty but for water glasses - on reflection, a good metaphor for the deceptive simplicity and elegant understatement of the food to come. Our meatlessness made ordering simple, although we did end up with an aperitif we weren't aware of ordering. We took the pre-snack too (intentionally in this case): one perfect spear of white asparagus, raw but coated in pistachios. Simple, beautiful and delicious: I'd eaten white asparagus only once before and been unimpressed by the subtlety of its flavour, but here not cooking it and treating it so simply let its taste stand out.

Then onto our four courses. First rolled red onions with Icelandic seaweed hidden inside and a smattering of birch syrup and salt crystals. Very pretty - a pinkish star on the plate. But a little disappointing - red onions are not made to be boiled or steamed, I find (bad camp food memories). Second was stunning: green soup of ramps and wild garlic, with leaf-thin mushroom slices balanced on top and cooked grains within. Nothing much to look at (chlorophyll-y DNA extraction-esque), but rammed with flavour and texture and perfect balance. Third was intriguing and clever and although not as immediately wonderful as number two no less full of depth. Purple carrot so dark you'd think it was beet, sliced so thin to be almost crisps, in a flowerlike form. Served with hollandaise scattered with oxalis (wood sorrel) leaves and flowers - so so pretty, yet still simple. Taken together the richness, sourness, sweetness and earthiness made it special. Last was ice cream: vanilla with orange. A swipe of perfectly smooth creaminess, with different driednesses of orange each bringing slightly different tastes and textures.

Fun, and clever, and thoughtful, but not overwhelming. Yesterday I noticed it is now the 53rd best restaurant in the world.

Manhattan food tour

We had 27 hours in Manhattan. So were determined to make every meal count. Starting with dumplings and osmanthus bubble tea in Chinatown. Interlude with Alan Partridge (probably the most I've ever laughed in a film screening). Then Dirt Candy in the East Village for enthralling vegetable-inspired food (mushroom mousse; all ways with beans; aubergine tiramisu with rosemary candy floss; jalapeno hushpuppies to make up for unfortunate three-legged-chair-to-the-floor incident). And chilled herbal tea into the night. The following day brunch at The Butcher's Daughter (Nolita?), with magical juices (watermelon, fennel and lavender), hot cacao, freshness and fabulous bathroom. Then snacks on the Highline Park - bread (fennel, golden raisin and semolina) from Amy's Bread (The Village) and an ice lolly (apple chai) from People's Pops. Beautiful weather all the way - so pretty and perfect.

Vedge in Philadelphia / Sauna Eggs in New Jersey

Just back from a road trip South to New Jersey and Philadelphia. We encountered some of the rainstorm Andrea on the road down, and stayed overnight at King Spa in Palisades Park, NJ. It's a 24 hour Korean spa, so for a very reasonable fee you can stay all night and all day. A good thing to do in the rain! While you're there, for $2 you can get three of their sauna-cooked eggs. They have a kiln sauna that they heat up every morning, apparently to 200C. As they heat it they put dozens of eggs in it to cook. We went in while the eggs were cooking and it was incredibly hot. You have to sit under a blanket to stay in there for any length of time. It smelled of egg: they were arranged on shelves along the walls. When we came out we watched a man go in to remove the eggs. He was wearing a protective face mask and heatproof gloves. We ate some eggs as soon as they went on sale - still too hot to handle. They were similar to tea eggs: slightly spiced, brown, and essentially hardboiled in the shell. Actually delicious, with a bit of salt.

We ate well in Philly. Lots of interesting vegetarian options. The first night we went to Khyber and ate vegan pulled pork sandwiches: seriously the best fake meat dish I have ever tried. The following night we went fancy and ate at Vedge: three of the four of us are veg, and I'd discovered the place online and got excited about it. N+G had been there before and confirmed it was worth getting excited about. We ate well: cocktails, plus various fancy vegan dishes. I got excited as they had ramps on the menu and I thought I would get to try them at last, just before the season ended, but then after they took our order they came back to tell us they were all out: bummer. Highlights included a halva ice-cream, heart of palm with pickled corn, salt-roasted golden beet. It wasn't 100% awesome: I couldn't help being a little disappointed with a few dishes (cauliflower soup, the ramps), but it was a great atmosphere and an ambitious menu that was truly, refreshingly veg-focussed.

Best Indian restaurant in Greater Boston?

It's taken a while, but we have at last found a really good Indian restaurant in Boston.  Well, it's in Somerville, near Union Square.  Increasingly, a lot of my favourite things are around Union Square.  There are nice music venues, a great farmer's market on Saturdays, it's close to my aerial studio, lots of our friends live round there...

Dosa Temple was recommended by my colleague Kishore, who is originally from Hyderabad.  We were talking about Indian food one day and I developed a real hankering for some.  So the next time S and I were on the hunt for a snack we stopped at Dosa Temple.  It is pure vegetarian, no booze, the interior looks and feels like places we ate at in India -from the wipe-down booths to the Bollywood music videos.

On our first visit I had a masala dosa, which was so massive it looked like a paper dosa (American portion sizes?  I dread to think what their paper dosa looks like), but was really good and crisp in all the right places, with decent coconut chutney and sambal.  I also had some tomato rasam, which was rich with tamarind and really hit the spot (portion was quite tiny, in contrast to the massive dosa).  We shared some gobi fritters, with tamarind and coriander chutneys for dunking, which was wonderful (although we were hungry for sure after a day at the beach).  And S had this dish that I've never seen before, apparently some kind of savoury veggie curry crossed with bread pudding.  He liked it, I was too busy with my dosa to eat much of it.

This place beats out all the other Indian places I've tried in Boston for authenticity, range of the menu, and tastiness (Punjabi Dhaba, Kebab Factory, Dosa Factory, Grain of Salt...).  None of those are bad, Dosa Temple is just really, really good.  I can't wait to go back and continue eating my way through the menu.

Gomier's, Belize

I had a feeling veg food in Central America might be mostly about beans, rice and plantains (these I love, so no real problem).  Our first few meals in Belize seemed to confirm this hunch.

So I was excited to go to Gomier's in Punta Gorda (PG).  Gomier is a characterful, slender Rasta, who runs an all-veg place (used to be pure veg, now includes seafood to appeal to more travellers) and makes his own tofu.  We wandered along Front Street looking at sea and pelicans and trying to find it - it's not hard to find really: on the outskirts of the town centre, by the main road going North, with a view to the Caribbean.  We sat at one of his outside tables, drinking fresh fruit juice (starfruit or orange that day), waiting for the food (it takes a while), watching the world and the sea, and felt at home in Belize.  I had his fried tofu with curry sauce, S had the same with barbecue sauce.  BBQ sauce is usually nasty, but Gomier's was incredibly good - sweet and spicy.  The fried tofu was different from any I'd had before - large pieces, with a very firm texture, and some kind of crispy breadcrumb-like coating - also very good.  Both came with vegetable rice and salad.  It was so good we went back, and the second time I tried his tofu balls - the same tofu but in balls the size of king marbles.  Similarly great, and this was the only place we found in Belize really focused on making veg food (although I heard about a Chinese place in Belmopan).

Not to say we didn't eat well basically all the time - also in PG we had an awesome Belizean breakfast at our guesthouse Nature's Way - prepared by the mother of the family that ran the place - hot ginger tea for me / first real coffee in Belize for Seb, and a plate piled with scrambled eggs, fried plantain, beans, toast, and fresh fruit (papaya, banana and pineapple) - home cooked and tasty as anything.  And Marian's Bayview was good too: faster food and more space than Gomier's; canteen style, good choice, servers behind smoked glass - green beans, some kind of veg, ubiquitous rice, killer hot sauce.

Other highlights were coconut curry (at Habanero's) in Caye Caulker; all kinds of Marie Sharp's hot sauce everywhere; fry jacks; new fruits - Belizean pear (red, pear-shaped but with a stone, tart-sweet and slightly pear-like taste) and Belizean plum (green or yellow and plum shaped; very tart and juicy, with fibrous parts towards the middle - served on the bus in a plastic bag with chili sugar mixed in) and old ones (wonderful pineapple, papaya, watermelon; orange plantations and banana trees everywhere); spicy palm hearts freshly foraged from the rainforest and prepared by a Mayan mama; cacao; tacos from ladies by the lake in Flores...

Pupusa ladies, San Ignacio market, Cayo

We had an especially good food time in San Ignacio: Flayva's, Sweet Ting and Hannah's were good (the first a great spot to hang out).  A place called Martha's was lauded by all the guidebooks, and rightfully so, as we ate dinner and breakfast there and had nothing but great, simple food.  S had a chaya burrito and it blew my mind: chaya (a Mayan green a bit like spinach) cooked with onions, wrapped in a thick flour tortilla and served with a scoop of coconut rice and a plantain.  Also, in San Ignacio market I at last managed to get my paws on a pupusa: they were being rolled by an older lady who didn't speak English, so a younger woman in a long dress and bonnet (her granddaughter?) translated for me.  Beans stuffed in a thick flour bread-pancake, griddled and served piping hot, with hot sauce and pickled cabbage to go on top: finger-scorchingly magnificent.

pupusa!

San Ignacio is very close to the Guatemalan border, so the food there was relatively Hispanic-influenced (as in Flores, obv), whereas PG was kinda Rasta/Caribbean/Garifuna, with lots of Mayans around there too (although not running restaurants, sadly). And Caye Caulker felt like pure Caribbean, with the coconut and curries reminding me of Jamaican food.

Veg food in Toronto

A quick Google of Toronto revealed plenty of veg food places, which boded well for it being a cool city.  It was, and we visited a good few of the veg places.  We stayed at a vegetarian b+b the first night - arrived late so went to Commensal for a quick dinner as it was 10 min walk away.  It was OK - a fill your plate with anything, cafeteria style place that hit the spot at the time.  Breakfast courtesy of Paul-Antoine the next morning was very nice, although not very vegan (I lapse into vegetarian when vegan is too awkward) - crepes prepared by a real Frenchman, plenty of fruit and bread+jam and cakes.  We also checked out Fressen one evening, which seemed to be the poshest veg*n option in town, and was nice in terms of atmosphere, although most of the food was not super exciting (pleasant enough).  A good find was a veg and non-veg desi soup place (Ravi Soups, on Queen St West), which we stumbled upon during Nuit Blanche and really hit the spot - I had a super tasty butternut squash soup with chopped asian pear and browned onion on top.

The real excitement was Jamaican - One Love Vegetarian.  We were lucky to get there during our stay, as it is closed Sundays and only open 11-6 on Saturdays.  So glad we made it though.  Was close to our second b+b - nr Koreatown (854 Bathurst St).  It seemed to be entirely vegan, even though the sign outside only said it was vegetarian.

We had a pumpkin roti, the soybean curd and lima bean curry (which came with rice+lentils, salad incl avocado and sunflower sprouts, and fried plantains), and a ginger beer each.  The ginger beer arrived first, and was the best I've ever had - soooo good (and pretty fiery).  Fiery hot sauce came on the side too.  It was all incredibly yummy.

And we only got to try a few things on a menu where we could have had anything!  We'd asked for the Callaloo first, they didn't have it that day - am interested in the green bananas.  The staff were really friendly (not OTT, just helpful and nice), and the whole place was just awesome.

ginger beer, pumpkin roti, soybean curd and lima bean curry with trimmings

Á Næstu Grösum

I just found some scraps of paper with notes from our trip to Iceland when we were moving to Boston.  I wanted to note down this place with more permanence.  We just had a few days in Midwinter, based in Reykjavik, on an Icelandair stop-off with all our belongings...  So we knew it'd be cold and we wouldn't be able to travel much.  I looked up some stuff to do before we went, and one thing I found was this vegetarian restaurant.  As far as I could tell it was the only veggie restaurant in the city if not the country, and considering this is a country with cuisine known for dried fish, whale meat and no vegetables, I thought the whereabouts of a veggie restaurant might be valuable information for us.

When we arrived to our hotel, struggling through the snow with our massive suitcases, I realised we seemed to be just around the corner from Á Næstu Grösum.  It took us a while to find it though - it is tucked away upstairs above the street, with a subtle entrance up the stairs from a side street.  We found it after a thorough hunt on our second day, and it was so good we kept going back!

It was a counter service set-up, serving generous plates of your choices of salads and hot meals, with interesting dressings too.  There were specials every day of hot food and soup, and everything was different each day, making it easy to eat with great variety.  Everything I tried was tasty and interesting, and since you could choose as much or as little of everything it never got dull or bad.  There was help-yourself water and an unpretentious ambience.  The best thing of all was the help-yourself bread (robust and seedy), hummus, date spread and toasted coconut.  Seriously, I could have eaten just that stuff and been happy as could be.  I wasn't vegan then, but I'm pretty sure we tried a vegan dessert and it was pretty good.

We hardly ever go to places more than once when on holiday - this place was such a veggie haven, everywhere else we looked with just one or two un-fresh sounding veggie options seemed so unappealing next to what we knew was waiting right by our hotel...

www.anaestugrosum.is