Hello all!
Time has come to write about my favourite restaurant in Budapest: Vegacity. Actually it is more like a student canteen or like a buffet because people wait in a queue and they have to take a tray, plates, glasses and cutlery for themselves. There are no waiters. Furthermore, prices of Vegacity are lower than prices at a restaurant. I would say Vegacity has perfectly fair prices. For the amount of money spent you receive an enormously big plate of food, and most importantly: quality and healthy food.
Let’s talk about the material background first and then about the fun part. There are menus at Vegacity containing a soup and a main course, but of course you can choose to serve only one meal as well. In general, a menu costs 1000-1100 HUF (3, 20 EUR), while a single dish price varies between 600-850 HUF (approximately 2, 2 EUR). Yes, I am a student, and yes, I need to have a sparing attitude regarding my budget. Until I tried Vegacity, I’ve always bought cheap food from supermarkets or have eaten at other places of Budapest. I tried student canteens, where the prices were low, but food portion was not satisfactory. Moreover, due to its cheapness, food quality was not the best. Meals contained a lot of water, flour, sugar, volumizing ingredients. For example when I asked chicken-paprikás with noodles, I received a plate with the following proportions: 80% noodles, 20% stew. After these unhealthy and exiguous experiences I tried my luck in the city centre around my university. I entered Chinese, Japanese, Turkish and traditional Hungarian restaurants (junk food was never ever an option), but the prices were higher than at the university canteen. The quality of food was better though; but I still wasn’t satisfied. I searched for the perfect food among two parametres: I wanted to eat healthy food (seeking for a balanced diet, less carbohydrates, more vegetables, fibers and healthy proteins), and the other condition was to find home-made warm food, reminding me of the food made by my mother. One day I entered Vegacity and fortunately until now it’s my stamping ground. Probably it will remain like that forever.
At Vegacity you can choose to serve just ’half’ a portion of food, thus you pay 50% only. Everyone is in fact controlling how much he or she wants to eat, because the announced prices refer at 100 g of food. So you can buy less or more as you will and count the money proportionally. Vegacity is located on Kálvin square, it’s easy to reach from Corvinus and Technical Unis, even from ELTE Humanities Faculty. It’s only a few minutes walk from Mikszáth and Szabó Ervin libraries, so Med students can rapidly get to it. Moreover, Vegacity is close to Pázmány Péter Catholic University/Law School as well. Vegacity is a modern vegan and vegetarian place in the heart of Budapest. Its glass windows and doors let guests watch the beautiful boulevard, the trams, the plane trees and a little part of the National Museum too. Once you enter Vegacity, you can choose between remaining on the ground floor or getting up by the glass stairs on the first floor.
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So the place is divided into two spaces. Up there is the toilet, and of course on the ground floor is the register and the counter with foods and drinks. Upstairs the atmosphere is more chill and there’s less buzzle, downstairs food is closer and it’s more comfortable to sit. You can sit on sofas, wooden chairs and tables and easy chairs. The decoration is built up from palm trees and many other plants and flowers. Black, green and yellow are the most often used colours at Vegacity. There is free WiFi of course, and another big bonus: when exiting Vegacity and going in the direction of Astoria, there are two bio shops. One of them is a pharmacy and juice-bar, with natural ingredients, medicaments and the other bio shop is in fact like a grocery store. You can buy vegetables, fruits, seeds, bakery products, desserts, juices, chocolates, dairy products, meats and also frozen food. Alga, goji berries, coconut crisps are just a few of the delicatesses. Perfect shop with perfect offers for those who are following a gluten-free, lactose-free, sugar-free or vegetarian/vegan diet. I’m not following any diet, so I don’t do my shopping at this store, because I consider it quite expensive. However, the quality is gorgeous, and if I were on a diet I would surely buy food from here.
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But back to Vegacity... There are several types of meals which can be served, let’s analise the menu a bit! First, there are 2 types of soup every day. I’ve tried red lentil soup and pumpkin seed cream soup, but there are other attractive ones, like algae soup with tapioca, carrot cream soup with leek, zucchini cream soup with dill or garlic cream soup. Second, garnish/side foods. My favourite is corn and jasmine rice, the amazing millet and bulgur and sweet potatoes. But I’d like to try in the future barley as well. Third, main meals/main course. What I love the most are vegetable pottages and casserole dishes. There’s spinach-paprika-pumpkin-zucchini subji (Subji is a food originating from India with vegetables (only! ) and sauce), Mediterranean vegetable stews with chickpeas, lentil stew with home-made mustard or spaghetti with chilli, peanut and zucchini. You can try lasagne bolognese as well, vegan sushi, eggplant-beetroot-greenpeas subji, mushroom sauce with potato croquettes and many more. I’m salivating right now, so I better stop.
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Fourth kind of meal: vegan and vegetarian burgers. Thai burgers, falafel burgers, Mediterranean and traditional Hungarian burgers. Never tried them, I’m not a hamburger fan, but I can assure you that they look tasty. Fifth round: main food which can be eaten as garnish. These foods are ’pseudo-meats’, in fact replace meat, but are high in proteins and remind of food (sorry for this terrible explanation). Fried tofu, fried sejtan, fried and crunchy broccoli, pumpkin, vegan meatloafs made of grains. Hummus is also great!
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And last but not least, sixth chapter: desserts. This group includes juices and cakes together. You can try natural cocktails, juices containing several ingredients, for example: coconut, pineapple, lime, ginger, passion fruit in one juice. Or blue curacao, beetroot, blue cabbage, lemon and grapefruit in another cocktail. There are also vegetables between the ingredients. Surely you can choose what quantity you would like to drink from 100 ml to 500 ml. Desserts vary between 400-500 HUF. Mostly chocolate and fruit-based cookies. Interestingly sesam seed is very popular among desserts. Several cakes are made of chickpeas flour and are sweetened by dates, xylitol or banana. There is a ’free-cake’, which is a gluten-free, sugar-free and lactose-free chocolate cake.
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I think there's nothing left to say, go ahead and try it. You won’t regret it!
Thanks for reading. Dora.
