Veganerie – if Carlsberg did coffee shops

For months we had the plan to pack up and go and live in Thailand, and nothing more than that. The focus for so long was on finding the right home for our kitties, then on letting out our flat, and then we moved through a mammoth To Do list of admin related tasks, from getting gas and electricity safety checks, to getting health insurance, life insurance, and landlords insurance, to sourcing and applying for a bank account that doesn’t charge the earth when drawing money and using a card abroad, etc etc etc. So we didn’t actually book anything for our trip, other than the flights, until a couple of weeks before we were due to fly.

I’m one of those people that has to put in an obligatory amount of research before I can pull the trigger on most decisions, particularly those relating to holiday destinations and choice of hotel. I planned and booked all of our previous holidays after hours and hours, across days and days, of trawling through the Internet and reading heaps of reviews for different options. But being a mum to a tireless toddler, with our home in a state of half-packed upheaval, and with the ‘Getting To Thailand’ To Do List version 30 on my phone still requiring quite a few finger swipes to reach the bottom, I had no time or energy to be true to myself in our Bangkok apartment search.

So with two weeks to go before we bid London goodbye and the pressure of a To Do List that refused to diminish in size, I had a fleeting look for some apartments in Bangkok with a kitchenette. We’ve gone down the Air BnB ‘whole house’ route since travelling as a family, so we can cook our babe meals, and close her in a room after we put her down at night and have a glass of wine and childless chat. This didn’t appear to be the most reasonable avenue in Bangkok though, where you can actually find quite a few apartments on standard travel sites like Booking.com. Within minutes I managed to find a place with brilliant reviews, and when I clicked on the map I found the clincher; Veganerie was in walking distance.

I’d run a foodie Instagram account (@the_hearty_vegan) for a while and had somehow come across and followed this much raved about coffee shop, and put it on my Bangkok Bucket List (currently just a list of one – now ticked off – item)! So the apartment was booked in an instant and, with all the stress behind us of packing away our lives, fitting a new life into suitcases, and setting off into a new world of possibility, we could sit back and enjoy our chocolate and banana waffle and Caesar wrap (even if I didn’t much enjoy the strong soy latte – clearly my western tastebuds will take a while to move on from Alpro).

The food was scrumptioulitious!! As vegans we don’t often get to indulge in a sweet brunch when eating out, so we were spoilt for choice here, and the choc-banana waffle hit the mark perfectly. I’d never have ordered the Caesar wrap myself, but when you’re partial to sharing meals to maximise what you get to taste, you have to (at least sometimes) each choose a dish to make it more interesting, and of course fair. And this equitable approach paid dividends to the taste buds this time! How could something I’d never even been bothered about when I ate meat – a chicken Caesar salad wrap – get me so excited? I don’t know – it must have had something to do with the more than meaty mushrooms and perfectly creamy sauce…the only criticism was it was too small and we wanted more, more, more! 

We left planning to go back!