National Vegetarian Week

Is your diary looking a bit on the empty side this week? Well then its time to pencil in some more veges! This week is National Vegetarian Week, and the aim is to encourage Australians to lower their meat intake by making a "Pledge to Try Veg".

No need to convince me on that front - my wife is a vegetarian, so I eat 4 to 5 vegetarian meals a week. If you're interested in finding out about eating more vegetables, then have a look at the Vegetarian Week website. There's plenty of information on the website, including the benefits of a vegetarian diet, recipes and details of cooking demonstrations during the week.

When it comes to vegetarian food in Brisbane, I hate to say it, but I think we lag a bit behind the rest of the World - good vegetarian restaurants don't really seem to have caught on here. The best vegetarian restaurant I've been to is The Gate in London, which serves excellent food. We used to live just down the road in Hammersmith, so we were very lucky to be able to wander down there for dinner.

If you're looking for good places to eat vegetarian food in Brisbane, then your local Indian or Asian restaurant is usually a good start. Otherwise, these are my wife's favourite places to eat vegetarian food - restaurants that actually make an effort to plate up something a bit more exciting than "risotto of the day":

Era Bistro - South Brisbane
Songbirds - Mount Tamborine
Azafran - Annerley
Berado's - Noosa
Absynthe - Gold Coast (will prepare a vegetarian degustation with advance notice)
Tandoori King - New Farm
Urbane - City (currently closed)

National Vegetarian Week
28 September to 4 October 2009
W - http://vegetarianweek.com.au/