Staycation Weekend: Vegan MoFo Day 11&12

Oh the weekend. It couldn’t come soon enough.  Normally, they don’t mean anything to me, because I have other things I need to be doing, but this week I was ready for it to be Saturday…. on Tuesday. And I got some much needed downtime.

I introduced an omnivore to Vegetarian Haven (17 Baldwin St, Toronto, ON) on Saturday. I (almost) wish I could say it was the first time he’d ever been to a vegetarian restaurant, but he’d been to Live before, so not only had he been to a vegan restaurant, he’d been to a raw one and liked it. Regardless, it was a great meal.

We started things off with an order of crispy oyster mushrooms and seared dumplings. I wish we had ordered two orders of the crispy oyster mushrooms because I can never have enough, they are so rich and flavourful and the sweet slightly spiced sauce is a perfect compliment for it.

We both ordered the Special of the Day which was a tofu skin wrapped taro root mash on a bed of greens, with a side of noodles, an AMAZING mango salad. Our waitress totally sold it when she brought it over. Her description totally got my mouth watering from the very beginning. It adds so much to a meal when the server is friendly, and she was wonderful.

I was feeling pretty full after finishing my plate, but there is always room for dessert. My dining companion and I shared a piece of chocolate cake and a brownie sundae (but since they were out of brownie, they used lightly warmed chocolate cookies.) What can I say, other then delicious delicious delicious. The chocolate cake was good, but not as good as the sundae. Though I’m glad our server made sure we took the left over chocolate cake home, because while it wasn’t as awesome when it went head to head with the sundae, it was fantastic by itself at 3am.

Sunday morning before a visit to the Ontario Art Gallery (317 Dundas Street W, Toronto, ON), we stopped into Frank for brunch. I’ve never looked over their menu, so it was nice to be told that one of the options on their brunch menu is actually vegan. The roasted shiitake mushrooms with heirloom squash. I didn’t realize it at first so when I asked the server what was vegan she recommended a custom dish with eggplant and braised lentils. It sounded good so we both went for it. Unfortunately, getting a custom dish at Frank means you pay a lot more than something on the menu would be. Sigh. Noted.

The Art Gallery of Ontario was awesome though. It was great to be there on such a crappy day, because the rain looked spectacular hitting the glass in the Galleria Italia. That was my favourite place to be, it’s such a nice bright space, with richly coloured wooden beams and huge sections of glass. Definitely worth a repeat visit.