My wife and I are taking a trip to London, Paris and Prague in September.
She’s now a vegetarian (not vegan), and is concerned about finding decent food that she can eat (not just salads). I assume that we should be able to find some good restaurants that have vegetarian options (and, that doesn’t mean vegetables cooked in beef broth…).
Any suggestions about traveling with this dietary restriction?
London and Paris, you should have no problem at all. I’m a vegetarian, and I had better food options in both those cities than I normally do traveling on business in the US. London has tons of Indian restaurants, Paris has lots of North African and Lebanese places. But even pubs and bistros have more vegetarian options than I remember from 15-20 years ago.
Prague, I have no first hand knowledge. But it’s a large cosmopolitan city now. I don’t expect you will have too much trouble.
Being a vegetarian in London is not a problem.
The Lonely Planet will usually point out a few dedicated vegetarian restaurants that go the extra mile. There are also online resources for vegetarians with recommendations. But even without those she will be fine.
I haven’t been to Prague in years, but there were vegetarian restaurants there in the mid 90s and I bet there are lots more now. It’s a great city.
We were in London, Bath, and Paris 4 years ago, and eating veg is no problem. Our tiny B&B in Bath had a homemade veggie sausage (really a sort of mushroom croquette) available as an option on their full English breakfast.
Even St John, which is known for dishes made with organ meats, has some veggie stuff on its menus.
There are lots of vegetarian places in Prague. I’m not vegetarian myself, but it’s even stood out to me how many I run across.
Granted, I don’t recall any of them being Czech vegetarian restaurants, so if your daughter wants to experience the local cuisine, that might be tough. But she’ll find places to eat.
While we had great falafel, vegetarian pizza and found one vegetarian restaurant in Paris, but it was quite difficult to convince staff at “normal” cafés that ham should not be in a vegetarian salad.
Thanks for all the information, folks.
I live in London and my wife is a vegetarian. You will have no trouble at all finding vegetarian options in London - more or less every restaurant will have at least one vegetarian main course, though obviously some of them are less appetizing than others.
Two specific recommendations are:
The Gate, a vegetarian only restaurant with branches in Hammersmith (near the Westfield mall, if shopping is on the agenda) and Islington. This is vegetarian high dining. Prices are higher than your average restaurant in London, but considerably cheaper than comparable carnivorous places. I’m a particular fan of their quiches, but have never had a duff meal there. It’s one of our go-to restaurants for special occasions.
Gujarati food in North London. Gujarat is a region of northern India which is routinely vegetarian and which supplies a disproportionate number of London’s British Indians. To get authentic Gujarati food (rather than standard British Indian food, which is Moghul or Pakistani food and heavily meat-based) go to Ealing Road in Wembley, nearest stations Alperton or Wembley Central. There are a load of excellent value options, and you can stop in at the Sree Sanatan Mandir, whose beautiful stone carvings look like they’ve been transplanted directly from India.
Believe it or not, some of the best pizza I’ve ever had in my life was in Prague - Pizzeria Kmotra.
London I found really easy as a vegetarian (all the cafes, restaurants and pubs had good options - though many were very cheese based … as suggested above, Indian vegetarian food in the UK is fantastic).
Paris was really hard. Most of the ‘tourist’ type restaurants were quite limited in vegetarian options (usually a lettuce salad with fried potatoes) … but there are great vegetarian options for non-french food which is fantastic! I’d definitely plan a bit ahead when looking for restaurants for vegetarian food in Paris rather than just walk by and look at menus in the main tourist strips … I got really sick of lettuce!