UrbanWireYou may have had your annual vegetarian meal on Vesak Day, but why stop there? After all, the benefits of a vegetarian diet include weight loss and longevity. UrbanWire has scouted out 4 vegetarian eateries.
Types Of Vegetarians
There are 8 types of vegetarianism: lacto-ovo, lacto, ovo, fruitarianism, veganism, raw veganism, su-vegetarism and marcobiotic diets.
Even though Livingreens is a vegan establishment, they have dishes that are suitable for followers of a marcobiotic diet. Macrobiotic diets are indistinct in the fact it sometimes isn’t fully vegetarian as followers sometimes consume fish. Mostly, followers eat unprocessed vegetarian food like whole grains, vegetables and beans for the nutrition.
Go green with LivinGreens
By Sarah Raziff
Get down to LivinGreens, a cosy vegan haven that brings out the best in your veggies.
Not a veggie fan? Try LivinGreens and you might just reconsider.
This vegan café, part of the Singapore Vegetarian Society, dedicates itself to whipping up tasty original meals that teach people to eat their vegetables right. It’s affordable too, with everything ranging from $4 to $12.
The Singapore Woman’s Weekly agreed, and awarded LivinGreens their Gold Plate Awards for the ‘All Time Favourites, Best For Vegetarians’.
The cosy café looks modest at a glance, but conceals a secret garden of yummy vegan dishes, all of them original recipes from the brainchild of owner and chef of LivinGreens, Ms Barbara Chin.
So what’s cooking?
The first star was the Lasagna. It’s unbelievable that their lasagna was gluten-free, containing no dairy products, because it still tasted exactly like the real deal! The delicate, tofu-like texture (made up of soy and arrow root powder) tastes much lighter than normal lasagna would, while the blend of fresh tomatoes, green and red peppers, carrots, mushroom, spices and fresh herbs go very well together.
Next up, veggie sushi! If you love your sushi, try their inventive Almond Sushi Roll. No rice, just raw vegetables wrapped in Nori-seaweed and drizzled with awesome dressing sauce made from almonds.
Swallow this whole to enjoy some fun non-stop crunch. It’s very pretty to look at too, the bright colours of red beetroots, orange carrots, white turnips and beansprouts with shades of green from the lettuce, sprinkled with black and white sesame sauce. It’s almost like they packaged a mini salad in every sushi roll. So cute, we almost couldn’t bear to eat it.
Ms Chin tells UrbanWire that the secret lies in the salad dressing, which makes everything else “more tasty, more flavourful, so that people can accept (the food) more easily,” explains Ms Chin. Their secret? Pumpkin seed, olive oil and some zesty lemon. Adding these ingredients to their salad dressing really makes a big difference – and we noticed it too.
The Vegetable Dumpling is as authentic as it gets, with its chewy skin made up of wholemeal flour wrapped around a paste of mixed vegetables, carrot, cabbage and black fungus inside each dumpling. Served with spicy sauce, balsamic vinegar with ginger, every morsel of the dumpling is bursting with flavour.
For dessert, UrbanWire sunk its teeth into the moist Walnut LivinGreens Organic Cake. Eggs, flour, butter, or wheat, which are typical staple ingredients in making a cake, were not used at all. Instead, grains made up the cake base and soy milk replaced the customary cream. The other cake flavours they offer are carrot cake, raspberry, blueberry and carob cake, which is used as a substitute for chocolate.
With its regular fan base of foreigners, the office crowd from the nearby CBD nearby and housewives, it’s no wonder that LivinGreens keeps its shelves well stocked with spices, organic ingredients, pure honey and healthy snacks.
They also sell health products such as aromatherapy Organic Rose Hip oils and balms for massage. Their environment focused posters and reading corner (they even have books on health and healing) also added a homey, yet educational touch into their décor.
But what we really enjoyed was how LivinGreens convinced us that eating vegetables aren’t as disgusting as our childhood selves believed.
Address: 325 Beach Road, Singapore 199559 (opposite The Concourse)
Telephone No.: 6396 5523
Opening Hours: 11:00am to 08:30pm, Mondays to Saturdays.
Rating: ★★★★☆
Environmental Reasons For Going Vegetarian:
- It takes 2500 gallons of water to produce 1 pound of beef and 25 gallons of water to produce a pound of wheat.
- 70% of the grain grown in the United States are fed to livestock.
- 8 times as much fossil fuel is used in meat production than in plant production.
- A meat-eater needs 2 to 4 times as much land to sustain their diet than vegetarian.
- Farmed livestock generate more greenhouse gases through manure than the world’s entire transport system
Other Vegetarian Eateries
*All photos taken by Engku Muhammad Iqbal