This is a chopped cheese sandwich, apparently a New York staple. One of my goals for this trip was to try food I hadn’t tasted before, and chopped cheese was on the list. Fortunately Plantega has installed their vegan menu into bodegas across the city, so it was easy to find a vegan version. It was a very good sandwich, hot and savory, and the bread (it’s called a roll) was delicious. It felt sort of like a pizza sloppy joe with fresh lettuce and tomato on fresh bread.
First time eating steak! Since I was raised vegetarian, I’d never had steak, and definitely not after I’d gone vegan. But they have vegan steak now! The all-vegan Willow restaurant in Chelsea serves the Chunk Foods steak with perfect mashed potatoes and crunchy asparagus. The dish is topped with whiskey peppercorn cream sauce. The steak is made from soy with beet juice for color. I’m not sure how steak is supposed to taste, but if it’s anything like this I think I get the whole steak thing now. It was fantastic, definitely worth a trip to New York.
I read somewhere that New Yorkers do breakfast sandwiches instead of breakfast burritos. (Which sounds like a terrible way to live, but I’ll cross that burrito-less bridge if I come to it.) Tompkins Square Bagels has a vegan bagel breakfast sandwich made of Beyond meat, JUST Egg, Stockeld Dreamery cheddar, and sriracha. (You can choose to have the sandwich on any of their vegan bagels, and most of their bagels are vegan.) It’s definitely no breakfast burrito or bagel with cream cheese, but it’s gooey and warm and hits the spot on a cold day.
My to-try list also included babka, perogies, and knishes. I struck out on vegan babka and perogies (one was closed and one didn’t do vegan anymore), but Yonah Schimmel’s knish came through. All eight of their savory knish flavors are vegan. I opted for the original potato knish, which is served with delicious mustard (I don’t usually like mustard). Basically it was snowball of mashed potatoes served without a fork, so you pinch off some and dip it in the mustard and everything goes right with the world.
I was most excited to try the Portuguese egg custard tart, pastel de nata. It’s tricky to make vegan (because of the egg custard part), but Joey Bats Cafe figure it out, and they are GOOD. The custard is caramelized in a flaky tart, topped with powdered sugar, and served warm. It was so good that I inhaled it without taking a picture–this is the to-go box.
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