When I want someone else to cook for me, I head straight to one of Berlin’s many yummy vegan or vegan-friendly Vietnamese restaurants. People always say vegan Asian food isn’t special as it’s so prevalent, but I don’t care. I love it all. I don’t know why I haven’t been over to Asia yet, it’s certainly at the top of my bucket list. I’m going to eat everything.
Ethiopian food is a close second. I’ve still been meaning to dig into Kittie’s Teff Love to make my own, but am saving it for a long winter weekend or something.
Here’s some dishes I had from Berlin’s vegan Vietnamese food offerings over the last year. By the way, if you’re curious about Berlin’s vegan scene, check out my Berlin Vegan Guide. It’s one of my most popular posts and I update it frequently!
Chay Village in Berlin, an all-vegan Vietnamese restaurant in Friedrichshain and Schöneberg. This is the regular pho, because sometimes you gotta keep it simple. I also got a rice flour batter fried banana with vegan vanilla ice cream and sesame seeds for dessert. Yumyumyumyum.
My mission for this winter is to perfect my ramen broth and make some legit stuff. I got this vegetarian cookbook called Bowl I’m SUPER excited to dig into. It focuses solely on ramen and dumplings. It’s not vegan, but almost everything in there is, and the recipes that aren’t mostly just involve leading a hard-boiled egg out. I already got my kombu ready for the broth!
Every Thursday there’s this event in Markhalle IV in Berlin called Street Food Thursday. It gets pretty crowded, but if you get there early it’s not so bad. I got these rice paper fulls filled with some mushroom tofu filling, topped with a rice vinegar sauce, lettuce, cilantro and crispy onions. It was delicious!
My current favorite dish in Berlin is this coconut milk pho from Cat Tuong in Prenzlauer Berg. Not only is it super colorful and beautiful, it had 3-4 types of mushrooms, tofu, seitan and a perfectly spiced broth. I love it so much, I could eat it for every meal.
I could list so many other dishes here, but Vietnamese food is definitely my go-to when I wanna go out and have someone else cook for me. Can’t wait to see what yours is!
I would argue GOOD vegan Asian food is hard to find. There isn’t any chinese take out places in the suburbs near me that serve anything aside junky general tso tofu… which you know if good for a certain type of mood.
In Berlin we’re pretty lucky that good Asian food is pretty easy to come by. I thank the international-ness of the city! That was not the case when I lived in England!