Best of the Dublin veggie venues

Image: Gill Rickson

Like so many European cities in the post-Euro age, Dublin has become increasingly more expensive over the last decade, with most of the best (albeit heaviest) food still found in your local pub, usually in the form of a delicious, buttery Irish breakfast or meat stew. Irish food is often regarded disdainfully by many of its international visitors, yet Dublin has a surprisingly large range of fashionably organic options, many amenable to the increasingly large vegan and vegetarian crowds living in the city, not to mention the often food-picky tourists arriving every day.

One notable lunch spot is an organic chain that has two locations in Dublin’s City Center. Feel free to sneer at the “chain” label, but Nude is of the local and unobtrusive variety, and a welcome alternative to nearby American burger joints. Nude, with its affordable sandwiches, pasta, and smoothies is perfect for a basic, cheap meal. Everything is offered in to-go containers, so it’s easy to grab a Panini and make your way up the nearby Grafton Street for a picnic in St. Stephen’s Green or a walk along the River Liffey to the Guinness Factory. While it doesn’t earn high marks for intricate or vastly creative dishes, it hits the spot for a light midday meal.

Around the corner from Nude’s Suffolk Street location is Cornucopia, which prides itself on being one of the oldest vegetarian establishments in the city. For the last 25 years, the restaurant has offered its share of complex vegetable soups, hefty, protein-rich salads, and main courses that ably hold their own without the added heft and flavor of meat. The restaurant offers cuisine from every nation from Ireland to Thailand, with main courses including spanakopita, green curries, baked Portobello mushrooms and spinach and hazelnut cannelloni.

Just west of Trinity College on Dame Street is the simply named gruel. The purposeful lower-case “g” is apropos for this low-key, organic restaurant, which caters to both vegetarians and meat-eaters. You can get your traditional Irish breakfast or blueberry pancakes in the mornings, and later in the afternoon, treat yourself to an alternative “tea time” meal of croque monsieur, a hot tuna melt, or scones. Dinner, however, is where gruel truly shines. Although there are hefty meat options for the carnivores, like bangers and mash and slow cooked pork belly with plum chutney, they also offer vegetable tajine, Thai fish cakes, and tasty salads for everyone else.

As it goes in seemingly every nation on earth, one of the safest bets for Vegans is sticking to Asian cuisine. And much like neighboring England, Ireland offers plenty of affordable Asian delicacies, allowing Vegans to have a wide-range of options without having to add the codicil of “hold the dairy.” Govindas offers a range of European-Indian fusion food, with a wide range of Vegan options. And there’s a reason Wagamama has become a popular world-wide chain – it’s interesting without being fussy for those with a more adventurous palate, but has its share of simple dishes for the pickier eaters. The menu is more or less the same in every location, whether you’re in Dublin or Boston, so you won’t necessarily find the variety or local-influence that you might discover in other restaurants. But Wagamama is a reliable spot for a tasty, simple meal.

Also be sure to keep an eye out for Blazing Salads at a variety of Dublin cafés, as well as its deli on Drury Street, which offers an expansive salad bar, tofu and vegetarian pizzas, and a range of baked goods. Juice on South Great Saint Georges Street also boasts itself as the only sit-down vegetarian restaurant in Dublin. Juice offers one of the most impressively creative brunch offerings in the city, alongside its expansive lunch and dinner menus, which goes beyond the typical vegetarian foods with ingredients like tempeh, lime-coriander relish, tapenade and vegetarian “paté.”

Photo taken from flickr Creative Commons, by Gill Rickson.