Buns of Steel and Other Headlines I've Always Sought Out

Last baking post of the day: more Vegan Brunch recipe-grifting. The Piazza is so deadly quiet down below that I finally feel that we understand each other. I sense that my home is ready for cinnamon buns, but not just any mall bun or canned roll. The sweat of vegan bakers is its own cinnamon. The pagination of these pinwheels is its own architectural lease.

Voila. Pumpkin Protein Smoothie from Odwalla and vegan cinnamon buns.

Vegan Cupcakes Really Do Take Over the World

You're opening a bakery, you say. It's gluten-free, raw, only for people within a certain BMI range, open on Wednesdays, fair-trade, sugar-free, the big O, low-tax-bracket, and damn if it ain't vegan as well. Welcome, congratulations, good luck. The dawn of niche bakeries has arrived in Philadelphia, after blacking out  in New York, where it's now an oddity to find an old-fashioned, artery-hardening pastry shop. Anyone, I tell you, can bake a vegan cupcake. There are books upon books that simplify it for you. It might not be stupendous, but it'll look darling, sickeningly so.

I love a baked good. If it's absolutely necessary. Because if it's just there to look pretty and it's clogging up prime retail space for a store that sells nut butter or great, life-saving tights, among other possible utilities, I'll leave it. Here are the newcomers and what to expect:

The Niche Bakers

Bella Sera Cafe: Opening in Fishtown in early October, offering 100% vegan pastry and coffee. The sweets list reads like the full line of Vegan Treats in Bethlehem. If that's the case, I'm sold. There are some real Vegan Treats freaks out there and it took this blog forever to recover.

Sweet Freedom Bakery:  As Grub Streeted about yesterday, this one's coming to South St. in November. Their goods promise to be so free of everything that you wonder what's in them. Deliciousness, perhaps? I'll let you know how the gluten/dairy/egg/wheat/soy-free, no-refined-sugar desserts play out.

Buttercream Cupcake Truck - Have yet to hit this one yet, the ever-tweeting cupcake mobile. They are working on a vegan cupcake. 

Sweetie's Pie Diner: Entirely vegetarian, with sweet or savory pies, this early October contender might relieve my overwhelmed teeth with a slice of something containing vegetables. Do excite.

The Classic Bakers

Flying Monkey: Not vegan, cupcakes can be dry, you have to fantasize about buttercream to be into these. The brownies are decadent and winning. Real storefront outside of the Reading Terminal Market location just opened.

Whipped Bakeshop:  All I really want in life is a Zoë Lukas wedding cake. There. I said it. Her bakehouse will come to Belgrade St. in Fishtown this fall.

Philly Cupcake: The warning came from Phoodie. I don't think I can try cupcakes from here without thinking about the long conversations I had with Mike, the baker that made me respect the Muffin. It might not feel right.

Meet the Frank Gehry of Vegetarian Sandwiches

If I knew any Drexel students, they would have told me about this.

In between breaths of WOMG WOMG WOMG, they would have thrust forth a foil offering.

The A&M Halal Falafel Omelet Hoagie.

Instead, I had to find out through Grub Street that a Gourmet scribe has found the neglected stepson of vegetarian sandwiches. He's so bad for you he's almost not even part of the vegetarian family.

Prov. Falafel. Omelet. Sriracha. Put that in your baseball glove. In an apropos finish, you can find A&M Halal's cart behind the Engineering Center.

East Coast Coffee Cake

I like my coffee in my cup and my cake in my cake. Coffeeless coffee cake is almost law.

East Coast Coffee Cake from Vegan Brunch (with blueberries)

Live...From the Rib Cook-off

9 a.m., and it already smells like a BBQ sauce factory downstairs at the Piazza. Contestants for the Cook-Off are smoking their wares along Hancock Street. I'm having my coffee and prepping for a nice workout before it all goes down.

September: Vegan Bakestyle

Apple bran flax muffins, made with whole wheat, flaxseed meal, and bran flour. Makes you tough.
Fashion Week Tofu Pumpkin Cheesecake and chocolate cookie crust. Looks good in a dress. I deserve a springform pan.
Mi Lah vegan coffeecake. Looks better than it is. I will fix the world by attempting the East Coast Coffeecake from Vegan Brunch.

The Tiffin 'Za

Oh, hello. Tiffin does pizza now. But is it really pizza? Can two people effectively split a kati roll? Does anyone need stuffed paratha with their pizza/kati meal? Will they make you diet Masala Pepsi?

We needed a rainy night to find out.

1) 3 veggie Indian pies to choose from. Decisions used to be so simple. Saag paneer, you're up. Who hasn't scooped saag paneer with a piece of naan before and called it dinner? The crust is an extremely thin, cracker-like flatbread, with a thin layer of spinach and two cheeses - ricotta and cottage. It's a mellow, cheesy ride, but I miss the lustrous spinach of my favorite Indian dish. It just doesn't get a word in edgewise. I think the spicier Paneer Tikka pie is a better match for me.


2) The fun part: Street foodies will write sonnets on the table in their own finger grease over the kati rolls. The Paneer do Pyoza was big enough for two as a side. The wrap contains cottage cheese (it reminds me so much of marinated tofu here), grilled onions, specks of mint, and devilish chutney. Slathered with an egg wash, it's $5 of good idea. It also comes in potato & herb.

3) I couldn't even look at the paratha. What? I couldn't. We counted on the Pyaz paratha (onions and herbs), because there was already too much paneer in our possession. Onion fans, where the hell are you? The one bite of paratha I took was the last thing I tasted until I wrangled with my toothbrush.

4) I didn't ask if they'd put cumin, black pepper, and black salt in Diet Pepsi. Only a communist would do that.

Tiffin, Etc., 712 W Girard Ave, Northern Liberties, 215.925.0770

A Brief Discourse on the Black Bean Burger

Village Whiskey, population 33. Or a close enough number. It's small in here. Tables are all taken on the inside, bourbon on every tongue.

Three days in, still hammering it all out, drinks come Sunday slow. I'm not here to demand perfection. I'm not here to sip. The price for whiskey by the ounce does not sit too well with me. At the size of the place, I can't see them giving it away. At the same time, I'd be smarter to buy a bottle over at 1913 Chestnut. Then drink it on the way back to my own village.

But I'm well-behaved. I settle for one cocktail, a Modern, scotch all over sloe gin in an orange bitters get-up. It's evenly priced at $11 and is nice for three sips. I forget about it because soft preztels, deviled eggs and a series of pickled vegetables have managed to arrive before our drinks even touch down. When I do return to my drink, it's watery. I suck.

These mason jar nibbles are surely likeable, black olive tapenade and whipped ricotta insured. But let us not forget our mission.

I'm here for the veggie burger and the veggie burger knows it. Our table requests three, for purposes of certainty. Someone behind us orders another veggie, as if to back us up. It's 1/3 of the burger menu. It should be the baddest bitch on Vegetarian Sansom.

One taster says what I'm feeling: It's not quite as good as the Noble burger a few yards away. It's got some girth, built out of black beans and edamame, muffining over the sesame seed bun. The burger accessorizes with guacamole, a miniscule dab that doesn't register, lettuce and tomato, and pickled cabbage, which is the strongest thing going for it. Cheddar is an extra $3, which one of us tacks on, only to find a minor sprinkle of shredded cheese dropped on top. I ate half of the massive sandwich, sated but not impressed. To fine-tune this thing, I would slap on the guac to spark up the mellow bean flavor. Serve with cheddar, sliced instead of shredded. I'm only picky because I've had 549,890 black bean burgers in my lifetime.

We expect a lot from Garces Restaurant Group, even right away, because they're usually ready for us.

The regular burger man at our table enjoyed his Village Burger topped with egg, and we all decided to come back for another round in the future. Biscuit fans should stick by for the Strawberry Shortcake with marinated strawberries. It tastes entirely like butter, if you like that kind of thing. The Village S'mores with chocolate mousse is vegetarian, made without gelatin. After a burger, though, I routinely want to leave dessert out of it. I ordinarily want to make out in elevators. I usually just want to scurry off into the night with that last note on my brain.

Village Whiskey, 118 South 20th St.

Prague: So Many Vegetarian Cafes, But Only One That I Get Engaged In

Vegetarian cafes in Prague seem stuck in the 90's, but that's better than nothing. The city itself is quite a mistress, whoring herself out to holiday Italians who came to buy garnets and marionettes. But deep down, underneath her bridges and on her Jewish tongue, she hides a little bit of everything. There's the street lined with Hermes, the Stairmaster-like climb for an absinthe ice cream ripoff from nuevo hucksters. On a deserted alley graffiti-boasting the word Romantik, there's a Buddhist veggie cafe that's half Horizons, half Cantina. Inside, we grasp guarana-laced juices and order more Euro-style Mexican food. Are we assholes for that?

"I think you mean the Clear Head," the concierge, a young Hugh Grant, laughs through his eyes.

Clear something. I knew it was clear something. "Yes, that's it. Is it far from the hotel?"

He pulls out a Four Seasons map of Prague, pen in hand. He draws a hard circle a few blocks away and starts dropping Czech street names like a gypsy gangster rapper. No mind. My reading is excellent.

Still, only famished vegetarians would ever notice this place, positioned indirect from much else. The food will not blow me away, but it will soothe me. It will nourish me the way that an eggplant quesadilla for a Philadelphian who has been stuck eating Austrian cake-food for days does. There's no reason to expect fireworks.

Like Cantina, if run by Buddhists
Oooh. That guarana.

There my hands are in front of me again, always jumping ahead.

I order dessert because I'm not ready to go.

I order dessert because carrot cake with millet is like how badly some people want FiOS over Comcast.

The server leaves us alone in the dark room. Or nearly alone. I have mentally blocked out the other couple that live in the corner over their own dessert. She only pops back to deliver that carrot cake, studded with millet and raisins, paused over a pool of dark chocolate. A nutritionist's melee.

There was love at this table before this thing showed up. My whole body is fucking melting into the table. I am a table. We are not letting our hands go.

I ordered the rest of my life.

We might have been to every vegetarian cafe in Prague, including the sister restaurant from the Lekha Llava (Clear Head) folks. Maitrea was larger and had newer design, with a feng shui interior. My soy bean burger, well, it had wonderful spatial arrangement, too.

Beet tartare with sweet potato chips

Vienna: Hotel Cake Wars and the Never-Ending Market

By this time, all was well on the vegetarisch diet. Soft-boiled eggs, room service yogurt, muesli with booze in it, along with real coffee (long espresso) to start the days, afternoons spent over coffee in Viennese cafes, trying not to order cakes. The thing was, you had to order cake in Vienna. They made you.

This is home to the beloved Sacher Torte, a dense chocolate novel of apricot jam. Viennese coffees are unsweetened whipped cream suicides. Our hotel, the Imperial, was the front of the Imperial Torte, a small square answer to Hotel Sacher. I thought the Sacher was far superior.

Dr. Falafel. If a moment was ever nothing-can-fuck-with-this, this was it. Falafel is one of those things that's great everywhere (even in the South, I bet). It went beyond that here. After communicating with the cook at his take-out counter, we sat down and ordered drinks from the bar. We watched our falafel hiss onto some plates, then sat in the crowded, sticky, perfect setting. Every bite was a different lover. An 11-year-old bussed our table quicker than anybody at Parc blinks. This was one of the cheapest things we ate on vacation.


This meal of all meals came out of nowhere in Vienna: Naschmarket. It might be one of my favorite places in the world. Miles of fruit, veg, falafel, and more outdoor lunch sessions than any market I've been to.

Munich: Banana Salad & Imitation Sausage

I read about Prinz Myshkin before taking on Munich. I didn't want to go there because I thought I could be tough and eat potatoes, mushrooms, pretzels and the two boxes of Clif bars that we packed. Nobody comes to Munich for the food, but we found plenty of it.

During one excursion, I fell upon Prinz Myshkin, it clicked in my head, and lunch was decided.




Who eats Mexican salad in Germany? I did, also demolishing more than my share of my fiance's meal. I regret not trying more Indian, as we found a whole section of Indian restaurants one day. I made up for it by allowing him a few bites of the yogurt-based cheesecake I chose for dessert.

Every time I saw the word bio, I wondered if we could steal the term and bring it back to Philly with us. Saying the word organic out loud: it's a tedious, yet often necessary distinction. Bio, man. It rolls.

Of course there was beer in every which way. Pretzels were as common as bread and several times more fresh. Once you get the beer halls and strudel out of the way, there's a lot more going on here. Fruit and vegetables colored everything, we found no reason to worry about that. In-season chanterelles appeared on every menu. Even the dates and apricots in our hotel room were nature's candy reserved for Munich before all.


You don't even have to skip the sausage. I spotted these only-in-Germany alternatives at a health food store. Damn, now my post is about sausage and you all know me too well.

Veg Out: Basic 4

Any time I'm at the Reading Terminal Market, I briefly consider eating something from Basic 4, the lone vegetarian vendor at the market (unless you count the produce merchants). Then I wander by, hesitate at the line, am instantly distracted by someone's spinach pie or giant rustic sword of bread or the smell of taco sex wafting from 12th Street Cantina. As many times as I've walked by, I've only eaten there twice.

Recently, I received an email from Basic 4 announcing their new look and press sampler. I didn't get around to picking mine up (we were supposed to pick it up on a Thursday only and I never got around to it). They finally have a website and are doing the Facebook/Twitter marketing rain dance.

The "new" Basic 4 looks like the old Basic 4. Some of the food is labeled now. The set-up appears to be the same - frenzied kitchen, notes of disorganization. My wait was extremely long. The woman who took my order was also cooking and flitting about. Another woman spent the entire 20 minutes that it took to get my order cutting a tray of vegan brownies as painfully slow as possible.



The menu has changed slightly, but the old one is still posted above the kitchen. The new one is much tinier and taped to the counter plexi. I almost didn't notice it. I went with the the vegetarian corned beef, thinking it would be both quick and interesting, something I wouldn't find elsewhere. I asked for soy cheese but never got it. I added a vegan cookie, was told to wait for it, but chucked it up to a $1.25 loss after deciding I could stand around no longer and didn't have time to discuss the wee refund. At that point, I didn't even mind. I was just concerned with my lunch being decent.

It was...alright. I don't return for alright. There are sandwiches out there that often require great hassle, but are worth it (Falafel Nazi, navigating Septa for a Fu Wah hoagie). You know the ones, the sandwiches that demand immediate reflection.

Now Playing: Cantina at Distrito

We've got an hour before Inglourious Basterds plays at the Bridge.

Sounds like two bar stools at Distrito for a swift, inexpensive meal. Fast food at Distrito? With the lower-priced downstairs menu that came out this week, this is a doable feast. Why would you ever settle for a burrito at Chipotle when portabella tacos are $5 a trio? Even the loneliest person in the world could not.

First up, the $5 Cantina Margarita, a formidable reminder that not all margs taste like the dirty bathwater of Sour Patch Kids. Even the lowliest margarita on Distrito's roster is a goddamn blessing.

Mouth properly agitated, have a go at the meatless offerings, a more promising selection than Distrito was previously known for. There are the portabella tacos with shredded radish on top, perfect 3-bite bar food. There are two $6 Mission-style quesadillas, one a traditional queso, the other a pepper & onion match held together with cheese, black beans, rice, and avocado. It comes with a fiery bitch of a salsa, the condiment that I often refer to as "Fun Dip". The $6 veggie enchilada is a dish you've seen here before, but enchiladas, man. Who has time for forks? Build your meal out with plantains, nachos Ignacio, or the sweet corn with chipotle.

Veggie End-of-Summer Must: Attend the A Full Plate Annual Rib Cook-off

Question for you. How many rib cook-offs do you find yourself at? Are your fingers not sticky enough? Face too clean? That's no way to be in the mouth of September.

Resolution? A Full Plate's 3rd Annual Rib Cook-Off on September 12. Details here.

I'll be lending my judgment to the vegetarian category, for all of you bbq seitan lovers in town (there's a small country of us now). Look for my cloth napkin dress.

Veg Out: Kong Me

Away with the mountain sun of late summer in Eastern Europe, I arrive in a different Philadelphia. A mad new Philadelphia that arches in shades of Northwest U.S., fogged out skylines and tingling air.

Kong opens in Northern Liberties, pitches Chinese belly-warming food. It all does, if it never did, make sense now.

Vegetarians can eat well here, get a spice punch in the mouth or two, and still not spend much money, even if they want to. My only regret is that there was no veggie bun option. Maybe that will change, if enough of us bug the kitchen with the shameless request.

Deep-fried asparagus with hoisin sauce:

Crispy, greasy, it's the Northern Liberties french fry. A more respectable name for it? Tempura. Back to the hoisin, which should replace BBQ sauce from now on for all occasions. It makes the simple snack even better. (Try the fried green beans if asparagus is not your type).

Hot and sour soup with tofu:

Hot and sour. I called someone that once. We made super sure that this dish was with vegetarian stock. The best case for mushrooms that we've heard since the surplus of chanterelles we ate the whole time in Germany. An island of soft tofu hangs out in the center -- tangy liquid respite surrounding. I know what I'm making my concierge leave outside the door when I pick up flu this fall.

Edamame dumplings with tofu and scallion:

Dumplings are almost never bad, in memory. I have nothing scathing to say about these, because my mouth is still full from enjoying them. Each dumpling was a sizeable more-than-one-bite. I absolutely loved the pureed filling. What could have been bland was not. A little hoisin and a bit of crunchy nut goes far.

Rice bowl with chili tofu and bok choy:

Given an election, I'd aim for the noodle, but the rice bowl was the vegetarian option last night. More bare-baby-bottom-soft tofu, with a chili glaze, over some abnormally special rice. Don't bat at the price for the noodle and rice bowls, they're plenty generous enough for two.

For drinks, we recommend the Kong Rice Ale, on tap for $5.

Kong, 702 N 2nd St.