2015 / march / 15

Budapest: tips for vegetarians

Just back from Budapest. A longer travelogue will follow in a separate post, here I want to share some tips for vegetarian food in this lovely city.
Always such a trip: busy sightseeing and suddenly I'm tired, haven't eaten for too long, time to eat... and vegetarian offerings in regular restaurants are very, very few. ("Oh yes, this is vegetarian, it only has chicken sir, no meat!").
On Sunday evening we succumbed to pizza but you don't want that every day. So thank the veggie gods that by accident we found some dedicated decent vegetarian restaurants, actually very close to our hotel and the Vaci Utca tourist strip, just a few streets to the east. There are some university buildings in that neighbourhood, lots of students around, hence a market for cheap and decent vegetarian food I guess.

Govinda - govinda.hu Close to Ferenciek Tere and Kalvin Ter metro. Vegetarian restaurant run by the Hare Krishnas. Mostly Indian dishes, but some Hungarian as well. Lovely ginger lemonade. So good, we went back here our last night.
On Kalvin Ter (metro 3 and 4, and tram 47 and 49) we found two almost next to eachother: Tao and Zen, allowing us to say that we came for the Tao, and we found Zen. Both serve Asian dishes. Good food, wide selection of fresh teas. Zen restaurant review on happy cow website
Edeni - edenivegan.hu On the Buda side, at the foot of castle hill one block up from metro and tram station Batthyany ter (metro 2, tram 19 and 41). . I had a veggie burger which was superb. Don't go here for coffee though, unless you like it with coconut milk. But then there's plenty of coffee houses to choose from for that...

All three (we didn't go to Tao) are self-service, meaning you order at the counter where the food is on display, you pay and then get yourself a table with your food on a tray. I liked this a lot: you see the food before you order it, and can 'talk' by pointing - often the English spoken was not so good so that was handy!. And when you're done, you can leave straight away. No need to flag down a waiter. It keeps the costs down, too - the most expensive meal we had for the two of us was 3100 forint including drinks (lemonade, lassi, tea) which is around 10 euro. Not much more than two espresso on castle hill...