yeah, promo shots had real horses, but these wire horses were EERIE.

Summer is good to me. Weekends are better (I try not to go into London on a school night)

Anyone got suggestions for a nice vegan-friendly restaurant / eating place in central London which could also cater for somewhat food-conservative omnivores? My aunt and uncle are coming to London this weekend, and we're planning to go for dinner / lunch + go sightseeing on Sunday. I'm too lazy to trawl the Internet to find something suitable :sleep: An all-vegan restaurant would probably be much too weird for them, but something health-oriented and / or featuring European-style cuisine would probably be just right.

Thanks for your input!

Mildred's in Soho has some conservative food, but it is all vegetarian. They have mushroom pie with peas and mushrooms, veggie burgers, stirfry, detox salads etc. Pizza Express would work too.

Wagamama always works for us. Many dishes are veggie and the one I like you just ask for the egg and prawn off.

yea wagamama's are great. :)

I've actually been to Mildred's a couple of times. I personally liked the food, but the place was extremely busy and too hip for my tastes.* It's not the sort of place I would want to drag my 70-something years old uncle who thinks pasta is exotic food.

I'm afraid that means Wagamama is out of the picture as well.

* The last time I was there I opted for take-away which I took back to my hotel room and ate in blessed tranquility.

I don't think Wagamama's is that bad, it can be busy but the staff are very good and efficient and the dishes aren't even that exotic, mostly rice or noodle dishes not too far off the norm. But very yummy :rockon:

hi, i'd like to move to the uk and i was reading some articles about crime stats there, they seem to be higher than the ones in america which seems ridiculous for a eu country :eek: it said muggings, theft and gang violence are very common these days. is this true? is it such a big problem in the uk? is it just london and the other major cities or is it a problem in small towns as well? if you've lived in both us and uk, how would you compare them, how safe did you feel in either of them? i live in romania which seems a lot safer than the uk or the us if the stats are real, i've never been the victim of a violent crime here and i feel safe walking around. cheers.:)

maybe the stats are higher...but that doesn't mean they are HIGH. I've never been the victim of a violent crime and don't know anyone who has (well...one guy got mugged for his phone but he was fine and it wasn't really 'violent'), although there is occasionally a case reported near me. Saddest one was a couple of years ago in my area a woman was mugged, and killed in the mugging, for her fish and chips :(

I feel very safe walking around though, except alone at night, and that's only because I have an overactive imagination and I'm scared of zombies! I live in urban sprawl of towns/villages merged into one, near a big city (Newcastle).
I have never been to the US so I can't compare the two.
I hope I was at least of some use :-/

<<<sends Kate a copy of Shaun of the Dead to use as a self-defense guide :)

vegan23..where did you find your stats for the UK and for the US?

Indian summer---if wagamama is too "exotic" then maybe Bella. There are lots of those in London and you can get pizza/pasta type dishes. they make a good bruschetta. My in laws were always overwelmed at pizza express because the toppings were unusual (rocket, capers etc). They liked Bella as it was familiar. And as I recal my FIL got a huge plate of nasty seafood that he really liked and my my pasta was pretty good. I like their chiabatta to dip in olive oil/balsamic vinegar. Yum!

edited to add: duckflaps! I didn't see where you said pasta was an exotic food. But maybe pasta with tomato sauce is more familiar than wagamama's unusual pastas like udon with pickled ginger.

Hey, thought one should pop in an have a nosey at the forum to his beloved homeland.

&&While i'm here do that extreamly irritating thing of asking a million and twelve questions. But i'm new to the whole vegan thing, so please excuse me.

So i've looked in Tesco, as it's where I work and i've looked in Morrisons as it's on the way home from college. But I can't find any of these products;

1) Dairy-free ice-cream
2) Cheezly melting varieties (I tried the chedder flavour Cheezly. Which I really didn't like, but I prefer mild chedder anyways. Where can I get the other varieties such as edam flavoured)
3) Nutrtional Yeast Flakes.

I appreciate it very much for pointers as to where I can get this stuff. Preferably in a national chain, unless anyone knows anywhere local around the Portsmouth area?

Thank you in advance =)

I've only found Cheezly at the hfs or at Holland and Barrett. Waitrose and Sainsbury's (and Tesco I think, but they're evil :p) carry Swedish Glace, and a couple of vegan sorbets.

Nutritional yeast flakes, I've yet to discover. Hm.

Nutritional yeast is called Engevita in the UK and is made by the company Marigold (who makes all those powdered stocks)

I have only bought it at a HFS. I buy it by the case. But you might try a Holland and Barrett. Do you have any independant HFS near you? You might have better luck at an independant.

I think you can order engevita from goodness direct.

Indian summer---if wagamama is too "exotic" then maybe Bella. There are lots of those in London and you can get pizza/pasta type dishes. they make a good bruschetta. My in laws were always overwelmed at pizza express because the toppings were unusual (rocket, capers etc). They liked Bella as it was familiar. And as I recal my FIL got a huge plate of nasty seafood that he really liked and my my pasta was pretty good. I like their chiabatta to dip in olive oil/balsamic vinegar. Yum!

edited to add: duckflaps! I didn't see where you said pasta was an exotic food. But maybe pasta with tomato sauce is more familiar than wagamama's unusual pastas like udon with pickled ginger.
Thanks, Spidergrrl! I think that will have to do.* There's even one in the same street as their hotel. And we've been to a Bella Italia restaurant in Oxford, and found the food to be pretty decent.

* Ideally, we'd need a vegan-friendly Scandinavian restaurant with elk and meat balls on the menu - since such a restaurant doesn't exist, vegan-friendly Italian will have to do!

An FYI for the UK gang:

We just discovered Oatly at our local Waitrose a few weeks ago, but we concerned about the vitamin D included in the fortified versions. Apparently someone at VF had the same concern and just posted this response from Oatly:

Thank you for your inquiry of Oatly.
The oatly healthy oat organic suitable for vegans. The enriched oatly drinks contain vitamin D3 which originate from sheeps wool fat. For your information we are investigating the possiblity to find an alternative to D3 suitable in our product.


:(

<<<sends Kate a copy of Shaun of the Dead to use as a self-defense guide :)

vegan23..where did you find your stats for the UK and for the US?

http://www.reason.com/news/show/28582.html , http://wheelgun.blogspot.com/2007/01/crime-in-uk-versus-crime-in-us.html , http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/810522.stm . i found most of these links in a thread where gun happy americans were talking about how it's better for public safety if guns are legal in a country. i usually don't pay attention to the trigger happy nutters but at least some of these stats are real and the uk is actually worse in some areas. ''Except for murder and rape Britain has overtaken the US for all major crimes."... so it seems even though the numbers for those are somewhat low the numbers for violent crimes like assault or muggings are very high even for american standards, not to mention eu ones. :(

I actually kinda agree with the Americans on the gun issue. "If you outlaw guns, then only outlaws will have guns." is a rather convincing statement.

Obviously, I don't want to see a society where any Tom Dick or Harry could walk into a gun shop and leave with an AK47. I'm talking about licensed firearms. Anyone who's going to commit a crime is just going to get theirs off the black market, or use a replica. banning guns doesn't work. Hell, a shop not so far away from me got held up with a 9mm not so long ago.

What I say is that guns should be availableto people whoare inclined to have a hobby that uses guns,and is the member of a shooting club. Handguns should be re-legalised, as the law which banned that was simply a reactionary law to the Dunblane massacre.

I wouldn't want a gun. But I can see why a fair few people would, and a couple of my friends would like to see looser gun legislation.

My only fear is that you'll get gun-nuts. That would be terrible.

An FYI for the UK gang:

We just discovered Oatly at our local Waitrose a few weeks ago, but we concerned about the vitamin D included in the fortified versions. Apparently someone at VF had the same concern and just posted this response from Oatly: :(

Nooooooo! say it isn't so. We have been buying the fortified as it has calcium and B12. Duckflaps! That's so annoying. I am also mad that i didn't think to question the origins of the Vit D as I was so focussed on teh calcium and B12.

:cry:

I'm very anti-gun and if our government tried loosening our gun laws I'd write so many angry letters I'd wind up with hand cramp.

That is evil with the Oatly, I wouldn't have guessed that...nice use of duckflaps though spider, it really inspired me.

The Oatly thing does stink, but it just means that we'll have to keep bugging them about it to ensure they know that the demand is there.
******
wrt crime....it takes some significant spin to make the UK out to be more violent (as a whole) than the US.

The most recent (2005) gun crime statistics I could find from the Home Office showed firearms being involved in about 22,000 crimes (from a .pdf file here: http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/hosbpubs1.html)

Compare that to about 1/2 million crimes in the US (http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/firearmnonfatalno.htm - and that doesn't even include murder)

Granted the US population's roughly 5 times that of the UK but, still, if you do the math...

You really have to compare smaller areas, imo. Of course there's going to be less violent crime where I am now, in Borington, Nowhereshire as compared to my old haunts in the south of Chicago or NW DC. But if you make a fairer comparison, say to Snoozeville, Michigan, where my parents live, then the US comes out ahead.

Some links:

Home Office crime statistics: http://www.crimestatistics.org.uk/output/page70.asp

US stats from the Department of Justice:
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/welcome.html

Hey!

Is anyone going to this:
http://www.viva.org.uk/roadshows07/reading.html

Only £1! What a deal. :)

I'm going! :)

Hey!

Is anyone going to this:
http://www.viva.org.uk/roadshows07/reading.html

Only £1! What a deal. :)

*volunteers to work at the Glasgow event in September* :)