Grain Store Restaurant, mentioned in this article, has been visited and access and disabled toilet are fantastic as is the food. N.B. make sure you don’t inadvertently order two courses with the same vegetable, can be overwhelming. They get a fully audited max 3 BBS Ticks, excellent.
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For many people who made it a New Year’s Resolution to start a new diet in order to lose some weight or just to be generally healthier, things may well already be looking a bit bleak. After two weeks of ‘rabbit food’ each stick of celery looks less appetizing than the last. But the situation needn’t seem so dire. For one thing, in reality rabbit have it a lot worse than dieters ever do. But on a more serious note, you can still treat yourself to a quality meal out, as long as you select where to go with a little care.
For the people who are starting to feel confined to their own homes, carefully regulating each leaf of lettuce that they eat, we’re here to give some advice on how to get out and where to eat without breaking your new rules. It’s still possible to go out for dinner and remain healthy. We’ve come up with a few strategies for doing so and a couple of examples, or ‘case studies’ of some accessible venues which would fit the bill.
One choice for those looking for a healthier lifestyle that is particularly fashionable right now is to go vegan. Cutting out animal products can be beneficial for your health, even if it’s just for a few weeks or so. Veganism isn’t necessarily all about an ethical or moral lifestyle choice, it can equally just be a dietary decision. But a word to the wise: if you are going to go to a vegan restaurant, you have to be a little more careful about what you wear than Beyonce was during her 22 day vegan diet. As long as you manage to avoid irritating the more puritanical vegans by doing something silly, like wearing fur or telling everybody that you work in an abattoir, going to a specialist vegan or vegetarian restaurant is a good experience that guarantees you’ll find a quality variety of healthy dishes.
Anyone who has gone vegan this New Year or is interested in trying more vegan cuisine will be interested, and possibly astonished, to know that last year Peta officially announced that the UK’s most vegan friendly city is…. Glasgow! It might come as a bit of a shock, particularly to all those who routinely make jokes at the expense of Scottish nutrition, but Glasgow is actually fantastic for vegans. So all the haters who go on about deep fried Mars bars can eat, well, some healthy fruit and veg. Maybe some Kale?
There are many vegan spots in Glasgow but the one we’re picking out here is called Mono. This modern cafe and bar is also a big, airy performance space with vegan takes on popular dishes. Bean burritos, nasi goreng, Vietnamese salad and porcini risotto are all on offer. There should’t be a problem with the access here as it’s nearly all on one level (apart from a small seating area), with a step free entrance. They also have an equipped disabled accessible toilet. Mono is one of the leading vegan venues in the country’s leading vegan city but there are many many more vegan and vegetarian restaurants to sample.
Glasgow might be the new place to go for vegan and vegetarian food but the traditional centres of this selective type of cuisine are still London and Brighton. Probably the finest and most recognised vegetarian restaurant in the country (not all their food is vegan but it’s a close compromise) is Terre à Terre in Brighton. The restaurant is one of the few vegetarian specialists, at least of those outside London, to commonly crop up on lists of the UK’s best places to eat, including in the Good Food Guide and at the OFM Awards.
Their excellent recipes are given fun names like Seven Wonders of the Weald and Fancy Nancy and are expertly crafted. Another great aspect of eating out at vegetarian restaurants is that, due to the absence of meat, you can expect a greatly reduced bill compared to most restaurants of this standard.
The access in the restaurant is also very good with a step-free entrance, flat or ramped floors inside and an equipped adapted toilet. The toilet has all the necessary features – low sink, low mirror and hand rails – but is a little bit narrow. It shouldn’t be a problem as there is still space for a wheelchair but it is not wide enough to turn 360 degrees so you have to reverse out. This isn’t the end of the world by any means and is really fairly common, but it’s good to know as much as possible before you go.
If you don’t want to lose your meat but just want to eat healthily then you can be pretty sure that a restaurant with a name like Grain Store (not ‘rabbit food’; more like chicken food) is likely to have a focus on high quality nutritional ingredients and you’d be right to guess as much. Chef Bruno Loubet and The Zetter Group’s Michael Benyan and Mark Sainsbury give vegetables equal billing with meat, if not the starring role at this London restaurant. Many of the dishes are vegetarian or vegan and you can easily surpass your recommended five a day in one modestly sized portion here.
The access is good too with a step free entrance through the Stable Street Road door. Inside there are some steps but disabled customers are given a sensibly positioned table on the same level as the entrance, near enough to the door and the disabled toilet for there to be no issues.
Of course not everyone who wants to be be healthier or lose weight this New Year will be willing, or perhaps even able, to go vegan. For those just looking to eat less – that most traditional, but hard to follow, of routes to weight loss – small taster menus are something to look out for. For instance, the ‘Grazing menus’ at Indian restaurant, Cinnamon Soho, provide five small but delicious dishes for a tenner throughout January.
Although it’s a small space they have put into a disabled toilet plus it’s all on one level with no steps to get in. We gave them 2.5 BBS Ticks when we reviewed them and here we’re using it more as an example of the sort of menu that you can enjoy without having to feel guilty about it. Keep an eye out for anything like this in your local area but perhaps stay clear for the larger and more expensive taster menus because the dishes and the calories involved all add up.
As a final thought, if vegetables aren’t your thing, maybe you’ll be more into eating insects. We’re looking out for the large scale arrival of insect cuisine at some point in the not too distant future (maybe it will replace veganism as the next celeb fad?). Creepy crawly cuisine might sound a little unpalatable but it’s very healthy – high in protein and low in fat – and it’s cheap. We’ve seen a couple of places pioneering insect recipes but it would be fair to say that it has yet to catch on. Hard to imagine why…
All get a provisional 2.5 BBS Ticks.