The Vancouver Meatless Meetup organized yet another vegan dinner, this time at Vegan Pizza House.
It's a tiny place, as most pizza take-out places tend to be. The big draw here, of course, is that it's vegan. The menu doesn't read that way, however, as it talks about things like ham, chicken, crab, and tuna. But that's all the funny fake-meat stuff, which has come a long way and does look, feel, and taste quite like the real thing.
We had five types of pizza, one slice each, three of which were off the regular menu. There's nothing overly creative here -- pizza combos you can expect to get at any pizza place.
As pizzas go, it's hard to say exactly what the reason was, but the pizzas seemed sloppily put together. It may have been that the generous and wet toppings weighed down the basically thin-crust style, so it was a bit tricky to actually pick up a slice without using both hands. Not quite as soggy and slippery as Marcello's, but nowhere near the convenience you can find with regular crust at any other pizza joint.
Still, if the cause was too much topping, that's hardly a complaint.
The off-the-menu three pizzas were pretty decent as pizzas go, but somewhat blander than usual (possibly because there wasn't as strong a meat-sauce base to it), While non-vegans may find the somewhat-different-tasting fake meat and fake cheese odd, there's no big culture shock here if you wandered in by accident looking for just another pizza joint. For vegan fare, looking at it from a non-vegan's point of view, I'd say this is a good thing.
If you're an omnivore humouring a vegan or vegetarian friend, I recommend the Vegan Meat Lover pizza, but ask them to go easy on that Daiya cheese.
Price-wise, I had trouble with it.
If you compare it to, say, a bargain basement place like Canadian 2-for-1 Pizza, Vegan Pizza House comes out ahead because you don't need to buy two pizzas for a comparable price, and you can also get a pickup discount of up to $4 for a large pizza (it's at the bottom of the brochure, on the inside).
The problem is that all pizza places are now competing with under-$5 frozen pizzas from the supermarket you can take home and bake at your convenience. Sure, some of it are the awfully small Dr. Oetkers pizza (which aren't as frequently on sale at Superstore), but nowadays you can count on the whopping nearly-1-kilogram Delissio pizzas to be about $5 and you can pull it out of the fridge whenever you need it.
Still, there's yet to be a frozen vegan pizza, so if you're a committed vegan, then you're out of luck.
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