London vegan café!

Vauxhall in London is a brand new quarter, and a really bon ton one. It’s a place where you easily meet men in suits and women with heells walking home from their nine to five job, among the clean streets with flowers in the balcony. It’s not exactly the place where you expect to find a bohemienne place like the Bonnington Café.

This is not the kind of place that you  find easily in the city of London.

It's a café - vegan restaurant, run by a cooperative of motivated cooks from all over the world. 

The Café was started in the 80s as a squat Café to provide a good cheap meal for the community. This goal hasn't changed, and you can still find good food at a reasonable price there.

You can read about it in their website:

http://s208303316.websitehome.co.uk/about.html

I suspected that the place was a special one when my friend said that we had to bring our own drinks, because the place hadn’t the license to sell it. That was the first hint. 

The second one was that the Mexican chica who welcomed us was really friendly and laid-back, she let us do as in our home, so we brought glasses to our table and arranged the tables in a shape suitable for fifteen people by ourselves. Crowded but cozy.
I was with a group of  people of the Polish Professionals in London, the fast growing association of which my friend is president.

You can see their website here:

https://www.polishprofessionals.org.uk/podstrony/about-us.html

The lunch was organized by a nice girl who had just gave up her job to start her own activity in her brand new agency concerned with cross-cultural mediation and non violence. That was indeed the right place to meet this kind of people!

The place had no menu, but only a list of vegan plates written on a big blackboard. Really similar to the place where Amelie worked in the movie Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain!

Between them we chose the Mediterranean Pie and the Spanish bites, and my friend Adam ended up having a Vegan Pineapple Tarte, after some initial exitations.

The Mediterranean Pie was made with soy "crumbles", also called "ground burger". These are soy food products that resemble cooked ground beef. 

Apart from it, it was made with peas, aubergines and onion, covered with a spicy sausage of diced tomatoes and aromatised with cumin, pepper, tabasco, garlic, and chili powder, and served with salad, lentils and olives.

Afterwards, I decided to have a look at the place, and pretended to go to the toilet.
In the first floor there was a board with the centre activities:  weekly literary kitchen, daily yoga at dawn, tarots reading, biocinetic massage, and a bunch of interesting activities.

They explained also that the place use only food provided by the local farmers of Elephant and Castel (this is the name of a area of London!).
Unfortunately, as I understood reading some paper on the wall in the second floor, the place is menaced by the development of the area, and it is possible that they make them close it in the near future.
When I came back to my table I was happy and at the same time a little bit sad that I cannot come to this place daily... The music from the movie ... Amélie Poulain was the perfect sound track of the evening, played by two dreamy players coming from another age....