Alice & Friends' Vegetarian Cafe Has Great Food

I've walked past the cozy-looking, purple-rooftop restaurant just about every weekend for three years, but until today I'd never had the opportunity to go in. Alice & Friends' Vegetarian Café is by far one of my favorite new vegetarian restaurants. Even better, none of their food has meat, poultry, fish, egg, or MSG in it. It sucks to go to restaurants with friends who are omnivores and only be able to order salad and bread so I'm always on the lookout for good vegetarian restaurants. I appreciate companies like Alice & Friends' Vegetarian Café that cater to the type of food I regularly eat.

The atmosphere inside is very quaint. I saw a lot of religious pamphlets circulating the bookshelves and some woman on television who I didn't recognize was talking about the vegetarian lifestyle. I'm not really fond of people preaching to me, so I put my headphones back on and blasted hip hop while I sat down in the wicker seats. (Note: I've never been to a restaurant that had such cute seats and the tables are made of decorative tile.)

I was a little skeptical when the waitress brought me warm water with lemons floating in it. I absolutely do not drink tap water, and the thing about lemons is that they leave all of these small specs in your glass. I'm never sure whether it's a dirty glass or the lemon, so I'd rather go without. I asked her for ice in the water, and she brought it out with no mysterious floaters.

There are so many great appetizers, salads, side dishes, and drinks on the menu so it was hard to choose. I settled for the unchicken drumsticks and the Runaway Potato dish with unbeef. I love fruit drinks so I ordered a banana and strawberry smoothie. I used to always get those smoothies from Bally Total Fitness, and I've been hooked ever since. The unchicken drumsticks came out with slices of cucumber and dipped in barbecue sauce that smelled delicious enough to lick off of the drumsticks. I think new vegetarians will really get into these things because they have the texture of chicken, but slightly softer. I've reached the point where I don't like my veggie meat to remind me of real meat, and this dish looked and tasted a little too similar, plus I had to pick it out of my teeth like real chicken. A couple years back, I'd have been crazy about those things. But now, it was a little too close for comfort.

However, I shoveled the Runaway Potato dish down. That was the only spicy dish I saw on the menu, and I am all about spicy food. It came with potato stew, unbeef chunk, carrots, onion, leek and Korean green pepper, all on steamed jasmine rice. I got my water ready and tasted a bite. Delicious! Potato and jasmine rice are definitely heavy on the stomach, but I didn't care. I drank enough water and the smoothie to try to balance it out. I am a huge fan of rice (brown, white, yellow, it doesn't matter to me) and potatoes so this dish was like the answer to my favorite food ever. It was strange that the unbeef tasted like beef to me, but I loved it. I guess with all of the other things in it, I didn't have time to imagine someone tricking me into eating meat. (I have a terrible habit of doing that when I see veggie meat that copies the shape and texture of the real thing.)

The soft-spoken waitress was very kind to me. She sat quietly on a bench until it was time to serve the next table. One couple leaving walked by me, and he stopped to ask what I was eating. He said he'd avoided the Runaway Potato because the menu said it was spicy, and trust me, it will bring tears to your eyes, but I give it the thumbs up. The prices were reasonable. I spent under $20 for all of this, and I love that they do carryout and have menus to grab, unlike my other favorite vegetarian restaurant, Soul Vegetarian East, which never has menus on hand for whatever reason.

I was way too full to try a dessert, but Alice & Friends' Vegetarian Café had some great stuff on the menu and a glass case full of sweets by the register. I give this restaurant five out of five stars, and there's no way in the world I'll let another three years go by before I'm back there again.