Skip to main content

Vegan Burgers from Loving Hut Express Food Cart



Loving Hut Express on Urbanspoon

On today's Food Bloggers Food Cart Crawl with PoshPudding (who very helpfully took a picture of the menu) and FoodPersuasion, we started at the Vancouver Art Gallery and headed for the nearby Roaming Dragon. Our next step was to trek all the way to Yaletown for the vegan Loving Hut Express.

Once upon a time, Loving Hut was a small restaurant on Broadway that had really decent vegan pizza (albeit with that creepy-tasting Daiya cheese). It also had a TV with Loving Hut founder Supreme Master Ching Hai's channel on it. There's no TV on the Loving Hut food cart.

The Loving Hut Express food cart uses Gardein fake meat, which is really quite good in both look and texture to real meat. Taste-wise it was harder to tell, smothered under delicious sauce and veggies, but there wasn't anything odd about it either. Some fake meats might have a strong off-flavour because of the tofu content, but it was nothing like that here. (That said, when I carefully isolated a piece of the the "traditional style patty" of the BBQ Onion Ring Cheese Burger, it was slightly bitter.)

Why the meat is inside might be a bit of a mystery. With a "regular" burger, the meat or patty is prominent and mostly you can taste some of it. Here, it's probably for the protein content because you can't really taste it. In fact, you might not be able to immediately see it as it's buried under everything. The burgers have greens and delicious sauce, and that's mostly what you get. The burger adds mass to each bite and makes it a more filling meal. At $8, it's a delicious meal at a reasonable price for how much you get.

We tried the Crispy Gardein Chick'n Burger and the BBQ Onion Ring Cheese Burger. Both were very sensibly priced so that after tax they each came out to a clean $8 and no coins to handle. The size of the burgers were also very good: Stacked quite thickly, and they use oval buns that are bigger than the usual round burger bun. Two small basic burgers from McDonalds would approximately equal one of these burgers.

The Cripsy Gardein Chick'n Burger (with avocado, lettuce, tomato, red onion, and topped with house made apricot-jalapeno relish, chipotle mayo) was actually on the slightly spicy-hot side with quite a bit of bite from the jalapeno, but overall there is a slight sweetness and that light, fresh feeling from eating salad. A good amount of veggie here and not a heavy feeling from eating it, like you might get from eating some burgers.

The BBQ Onion Ring Cheese Burger ("traditional style patty", crispy onion rings, housemade cheese sauce, tomato, red onion, iceberg lettuce, BBQ sauce, vegan mayo) is a really stacked burger, in part due to the onion rings. With this burger, I have to say that it's best if you eat it RIGHT AWAY. The onion rings would still be crispy, and that can make a big difference to the overall experience.
Because of the generous amount of sauce, the onion rings get soggy really fast. Just walking from the cart to Roundhouse Community Centre so that we could have our burgers in the warm and away from the wet of the rainy day meant the onion rings had turned to mush. However, it was still a delicious burger. The vegan cheese sauce also lacked the heavy feeling and potential oiliness you can get from using real cheese.

Overall I'm very impressed, and I am very hard to please when it comes to food. Hopefully future experiences here will see consistent taste and quality.

Loving Hut also carries locally made Zimt Chocolates, which are raw, vegan, organic, and fair-trade. We tried a bar of Sweet Orange Nib'd ($6; dark chocolate, studded with crunchy cacao nibs, hints of sweet orange, cacao butter, coconut nectar, cacao powder, cacao nibs, coconut sugar, sweet orange essential oil). The chocolate has a very nice gloss on it. It doesn't melt in your mouth as easily as Belgian chocolate so some chewing is necessary here. There's a strong orange flavour, plus fun nut-like crunch from the cacao nibs. There was, however, also a lingering bitter aftertaste, probably from those same cacao nibs.

Comments

  1. I love this food cart- the sammis are incredible, I think. And everyone who works there is so nice!

    So glad you liked the Zimt! Try the Chocolate Coconut Fudge next time, if you'd like- everyone seems to love the filling =) The bitter contrast to the sweet chocolate in the Sweet Orange Nib'd is from those nibs, which are pure cocoa beans!

    ReplyDelete
  2. @Emma - I'm aiming to go back to Loving Hut Express in February. I'll be sure to look for another flavour of Zimt while I'm there! (^_^)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Trafalgar's European Explorer 2006 memoirs part 3

A picture from my 2006 trip, a Trafalgar 's bus tour, on an itinerary called the European Explorer. I can't remember why I had this couple in the picture, but I do vaguely remember this to be in London, on the first official day of the tour group getting together. Their insistence on my helping them take a picture caused the three of us to be late getting back to the bus. The local tour guide had a "rule" about lateness, that we had to buy chocolate to share with everyone. As it turned out, later in the trip, on at least two occasions, we were stuck on the highway on either a long commute or a traffic jam, and I had chocolate and chocolate-covered marzipan to share. About the chocolate-covered marzipan -- Apparently we were in Austria just as they were celebrating Mozart's birthday with special marzipans wrapped in foil with the famous composer's picture. I'm pretty sure it was Mirabell Mozartkugeln . Anyway, there were enough to go around the en

Trafalgar's European Explorer 2006 memoirs part 10

The last of my pictures (at least the ones that survived the cheesy disposable cameras) from my 2006 trip, a Trafalgar 's bus tour, on an itinerary called the European Explorer. Below is the obligatory group photo. Not sure everyone's in it, actually. I'm pretty sure this one was taken by the tour director, Mike Scrimshire as I'm in the back row, on the right side.

Trafalgar's European Explorer 2006 memoirs part 9

More assorted couples on my 2006 trip, a Trafalgar 's bus tour, on an itinerary called the European Explorer. An American couple who joked about being from "the land of the giants" -- and with good reason, because both of them were really tall! A cute Jewish mother-daughter pair who ducked out part-way to divert to Israel. I vaguely remember the issue of the daughter being an orthodox Jew was highlighted in France when, to make things easy, she just declared herself vegetarian for the wait staff. I also remember there was some logistics error in France because our party size was way underestimated or simply relayed incorrectly, and there was a shortage of food at dinner. Dessert came as an unopened can of yogurt. It did not seem like they tried to make it up to us later, either. Plus there was smoking every which way in France, and I had a helluva time with that. We were also in a hotel that seemed tucked away in the burbs, and not walking distance from anythin