Vegetarian Friendly Countries

floyd333

Folks,

I'm trying to sort a holiday at the moment. I want to go somewhere a little different. I was thinking maybe a few days in Istanbul but I'm not sure how I would manage for food:( Can ye recommnrd some counties that may be more veggie friendly?

cheers....

olaola

I know India has huge areas that are vegeterian only. But it might be a bit far?!?!

Blackhorse Slim

Turkey is just the name of the country, you don't have to eat it there.

rockbeer

As olaola says, India... it's a hell of a long way to go for a few days, but you're sure to find fantastic vegetarian food everywhere you go. Hardly surprising with 400 million vegetarians living there.

Closer to home, Italy and the UK are probably the most veggie-friendly countries in Europe, but you shouldn't have any trouble in any big European city. Barcelona has some great veggie places as well as being a top place to visit in just about every other way and cheap to get there with Ryanair.

Good luck wherever you choose - wish I was going. This is the most dismal summer ever, even by our appalling standards.

floyd333

rockbeer wrote:

As olaola says, India... it's a hell of a long way to go for a few days, but you're sure to find fantastic vegetarian food everywhere you go. Hardly surprising with 400 million vegetarians living there.

Yeah would love to go India but only have a week max to play with

rockbeer wrote:

Closer to home, Italy and the UK are probably the most veggie-friendly countries in Europe, but you shouldn't have any trouble in any big European city. Barcelona has some great veggie places as well as being a top place to visit in just about every other way and cheap to get there with Ryanair.

Yeah Barcelona is good. I've been to most of the really big Euopean cities... .would like to try something off the beaten track.

rockbeer wrote:

Good luck wherever you choose - wish I was going. This is the most dismal summer ever, even by our appalling standards.

Yeah this weather is so fecking depressing... me needs a holiday so bad:)

Hugh Hefner

rockbeer wrote:

Closer to home, Italy and the UK are probably the most veggie-friendly countries in Europe, but you shouldn't have any trouble in any big European city.

I've found Italy to be quite bad when it comes to vegetarian food. Most of the time the only vegetarian thing on the menu was pasta with tomato sauce. Venice only had a single vegetarian restaurant, and about a third of their meals had meat (great food though).

Of course, any major metropolitan area will have vegetarian food these days.

embraer170

I think a fairer way to rate places is to exclude vegetarian restaurants....

Outside of specific restaurants, I found Barcelona (and Spain more generally) quite hard as a vegetarian. Plenty of beef stock or whatever in things you mightn't be expecting...

France isn't always the easiest either and I recall times when a salad was about the only vegetarian food on the menu.

I'd be able to come up with a list of vegetarian unfriendly countries a lot quicker....

Peanut

Hey floyd,
I spent a lot of time in Istanbul this year and last.

It's not really much more difficult to be veggie than here.
In fact in some ways it's easier - there are pluses and minuses.

On the plus side, there are a lot of snacks and starters that are veggie.
Street vendors sell simit (sesame bread) and misir (boiled or burnt(!) sweetcorn).


(çay, simit, peynir)

There are a number of vegetarian restaurants (about the same as in Dublin) & there's even a new, very stylish, purely Vegan restaurant. There are also many places where you can get pizza/pasta dishes for example.

If you are stuck for quick bite to eat, you can go into a "simit sarayi" place which is a bit like a mcDonalds of sesame bread snacks! (If you are *really* stuck, you can go to a Starbucks :rolleyes: ) (But before going to starbucks, try Gloria Jeans first...)


Gozleme is a delicious traditional type of flatbread with either cheese, spinach or potato sandwiched inside. A bit like calzone, but flatter, and not eggy like pancakes.


Kumpir is baked potato with various toppings, you can usually pick 5 or so.
Most are veggie, but sometimes in the cheaper places, the meats ones get slopped in with the veg.. bleagh.. :-p ->


Boreks are very common and are also usually veg. ->


You can also get plates of starters or mezes, the vast majority of these are veg.

If you go to some of the modern shopping malls (e.g. Cevahir or Kanyon), you can get pretty much whatever style of food you like..

Also, there are fantastic selections of nuts & dried snacks, both prepacked and in 'kuruyemis' (dried fruit & nut shops). Tadim brand misir is the crack cocaine of the snack world


On the minus side, there is zero concept of mentioning whether something is vegetarian on prepacked food. Not really a big deal. On menus, there is a reasonable chance that there will be a 'veg' section.

Also, there are some foods which have meat in them that may not be obvious at first glance, like lamacun.
Oh and there's no peanut butter :-p


So to sum up, you won't have any problems. Also if you stay in a decent enough place, the Turkish breakfast is really great if you are veg. - it's usually tea/coffee with bread,cheese,olives,tomatoes,cucumber,jam,honey etc. and some places throw in a bunch of other stuff like helva. (Oh a word of warning - self-service tea is concentrated and has to be diluted half and half with boiling water first!)

floyd333

Peanut wrote:

Hey floyd,
I spent a lot of time in Istanbul this year and last.

Cheers for the excellent info Peanut

Istanbul sounds like it might just be the place.