ACL's Veggie Variety

This week I am changing it up a bit. Typically, I follow food around Waco, but this week I traveled to Austin for Austin City Limits. I thought it would be interesting to report if the music festival had meatless options, and if the tents that sold them served quality vegetarian food.  

To my astonishment, I was pleasantly surprised! Not only did many of the trailers offer vegetarian options, but they were actually really delicious. I would say about half of the restaurants there offered meat free alternatives to their normal foods.

All the food was fairly easy to eat since it was premade and meant to be convenient to walk around the festival with.

I decided to go to Chi’lantro BBQ, why barbeque you ask? As much as you think they may only have meat they actually offered Korean Tofu Tacos. They came in tortillas with slaw and some sort of barbeque sauce and of course, tofu. They were delicious and fairly easy to eat.

The only downside to this was the price. For two tacos I paid nine dollars. However, everything at the festival was around this price so it wasn’t unreasonable.

I highly recommend if you are ever in the Austin area to give Chi’lantro a stop. Although it is known for the Korean barbeque, they also have delicious vegetarian options to try out.

Mixing it up with The Mix Cafe

Today I revisited one of my favorite restaurants to go to freshman year. The Mix Café is within walking distance of campus and conveniently right behind the business school.

We decided to eat outside because of the beautiful weather as well as the space in the restaurant being limited. The menu is also limited, although there were a number of vegetarian choices. Also, if you eat inside occasionally you come out smelling like grease, which I did not want to chance.

I got the artichoke & feta flatbread with some sweet tea. On it comes spinach, feta, artichokes, Italian seasoning drizzled with a balsamic glaze.

The food came out fast, however I wish the flatbread had more melted cheese to keep all of the spinach and artichokes on the flatbread. At first when I got it, I thought it was just a basket filled with artichokes spinach and feta, but then realized the giant flatbread underneath. It was quite difficult to eat considering it was just cut in half leaving the pieces still fairly large. The artichoke chunks were also kind of bulky, making it easy for them to fall off.

The flavors were delicious and location convenient, but I don't think I would order this meal again due to the difficulty of eating it.

Sometimes Rice and Beans are the Best Part of a Meal

This week I went to another one of my favorite restaurants from Austin, Chuy’s. They serve tex-mex food and have a good amount of vegetarian options on the menu.

Chips and salsa hit the table as soon as we sat down, and nice tall glasses of water, which after the game, tasted better than usual. They also gave us creamy jalapeño sauce to go with the chips which is one of my absolute favorites perfectly balancing the spice with creamy ranch sauce.

            For my meal I decided to try the veggie enchiladas. In it was spinach, onions, zucchini, yellow squash, red bell peppers, serranos, roasted green chiles and corn. It was topped with cheese and came together rolled in a homemade blue corn tortilla with topped with their famous ranchero sauce. Ranchero sauce is fairly mild made of roasted vegetables and is meat free. They also came with a side of rice and beans just as all the other enchilada plates do.

            To be quite honest I wasn’t a fan of these enchiladas. They were hard to cut and nearly impossible to keep the vegetables from falling out as I took a bite. There was also just a glob of spinach thrown on the top which was not pleasing aesthetically or to eat. The blue corn tortilla was also really dry and there wasn’t enough sauce to cover the whole meal.

            If I was vegetarian, I probably wouldn’t return to Chuy’s, or if I did, I would order something different.