Madrid
It’s been a month since my last entry. Busy busy busy. I seem to be overloaded with work. Well, by work I mean zine work… not real work. I don’t class zine work as real work even though it’s what I put most of my time and effort into.
This past weekend I went to Madrid though, and since while I was there I managed to go to a couple of veggie places, I thought I’d post here about them. Unfortunately I didn’t visit enough to warrant a special ‘Vegan Madrid’ page on the website. My trip saw me arriving into Madrid Friday evening - and then heading to the airport at 3.30am on Sunday morning.
Friday evening I decided I’d check out Yerbabuena, which is at Bordadores, 3, in Madrid. It is quite a small place with room for room for about 40 people. Unfortunately when I got there it was full (well, one table had a ‘reserved’ sign, another was free, but the man said that was reserved too, and a couple were leaving but the waiter said that was reserved too!). The waiter asked me to come back in 20mins. Being that I’m a bit impatient, I decided not go back that evening and instead I went to get fries at Maoz (us busy jetsetters do not have time to waste and hang around! lol). If you want to visit Yerbabuena in the evening it may be better to call to reserve the table to be sure you get one.
Maoz (http://www.maozusa.com/) is a great little fast food chain that sells falafel and other vegetarian food. There are branches in the US, UK, Netherlands, Spain and France. The Madrid location was at Calle Mayor, 4. What I especially liked was that it was so close to a McDonalds and Burger King - showing that fast food doesn’t need to be made from dead animals and there are alternatives that taste great. I went in and grabbed fries and a drink.
Next day my friend and I headed to Yerbabuena (http://www.yerbabuena.ws) for my second attempt. Thankfully this time it wasn’t packed and we got a table. Their menu is extensive with all sorts of items, either vegan or vegetarian. Lots of food to choose from and lots of drinks too. It was hard to choose what to eat as there were many good choices. They had a pizza on the menu, so being as soya cheese pizza is my fave food in the whole world, I asked if they could do me a soya cheese pizza. Yes, they said! It came with a bit of salad and garlic on top (I’d have preferred just the cheese pizza but I won’t complain about that too much!). The pizza was huge and I was full before reaching the end. Although maybe the garlic also put me off slightly. That said, if I’m ever in Madrid again I’d go back and ask for it again (just ‘no garlic’, next time).
Drinks-wise I asked for a soya hot chocolate, which interestingly came in a glass with a straw and half a cherry in the straw! It was nice, though!
My friend has this to eat, which she enjoyed…
We also were given nachos and guacamole as an entree, and some mints/sweets with the bill.
The one thing I didn’t like about Madrid was at the airport in the tourist shop when I saw T-shirts with bulls on. Spain, we hate bullfighting. Do you not realise that? Only idiots with no brains or hearts care about bullfighting. Thankfully the cool veggie restaurants made up for this and it was soon forgotten. It’s great to see that even in a city/country where animals are abused and mistreated, there are vegans and vegetarians and vegan-friendly food places. With Catalonia being the first Spanish city to ban bullfighting, the evil sport is on the way out… while vegetarianism is growing and growing.
