A few weeks ago, I went down east for a little R&R and to visit my family and a friend and I went on a road trip. Happy Cow told me there was a veg restaurant in Wolfville so that's where we stopped. Thankfully, the Blissful Bovine was up to date on this one. On the main street in tiny, picturesque Wolfville (most famous, I think, for being the home of the most expensive university in Canada!) was The Vegetarian Lunchbox, looking all cute and artsy in the sunshine.
I was excited to try their stuff and I wasn't disappointed. I had the rice bowl which had lots of tofu and veggies and my choice of sauce (I chose the miso gravy, because miso is pretty much my favourite thing in the world these days). It was delicious and a beautiful thing to contemplate - before it ended up in my belly anyway.
One thing I find really interesting about travel is how different tofu can taste, depending on where you are. In The Vegetarian Lunchbox and a number of grocery stores I shopped in while in NS, I saw what was, to me, a new brand of tofu: Acadiana Soy products. I tried their smoked tofu and it was just fabulous - to me, much tastier than the West Coast Smoked Tofu available in Toronto, and that's pretty fantastic stuff. I've asked a few local businesses to start carrying the Acadiana, if possible, but so far I haven't seen it.
What I love about this down east vegan lunch experience is how it reflects how things have changed for veg*ns in NS since I left. When I moved away in 1999, you could get only one kind of soy milk in the stores and it was disgusting. There were no fakey meat products around and indeed, almost no tofu. Now, the variety of non-dairy milks and non-animal based protein sources are as numerous there as they are in Toronto, which to me is a veg*n mecca.
Rock on, east coast! I'm not moving back, no matter how nicely you may ask, but it sure is cooler to visit you now.
Awesomes!
ReplyDeleteI was on the west coast of NFLD about 3-4 summers ago and I couldn't find Tofu anywhere. I literally had chick peas at every meal. The Chinese restaurant in Port Aux Basques hadn't even HEARD of tofu, mind you it was run by white people. Despite this I would go back in an instant for the beauty of the land and the niceness of the people.