Travelling Vegans ? Basel, Switzerland

Just before Christmas we travelled to Basel, Switzerland intending to meet up with friends from London and see the traditional Christmas Markets. Unfortunately due to the snow our friends flights out of London were cancelled and they couldn?t make it sotThat meant Mike and I were left to explore Basel on our own.

Basel is an interesting town as is right on the border of Germany and France yet it has its own unique style and accents, which let you know you?re not in Germany anymore. The old town is also very steep and alleyways will turn a bend and you?re suddenly hiking up a massive hill, not so great for high-heels in the snow.

Basel is also the only town with access to a port with the river Rhine going straight through the middle of it.

But enough of the travel information and on to the food!!!!

Surprisingly Basel has a good selection of food for vegans. There are only a couple of places but considering the size of the town this is more than we could have hoped for (considering we live in Frankfurt am Main, which is approximately 6x as big with no vegan restaurant, cafe?s or well? anything!).

Before we travelled to Basel we did some research and found this vegetarian restaurant chain that has several restaurants across Switzerland. Basically you pick what you want from the buffet and pay on the weight of your plate. So we emailed them to see if they also do vegan options and got this amazing response, which sums up their offerings perfectly:

?The heart of tibits is our food boat with over 40 hot and cold dishes, freshly cooked every day. All the ingredients in our products are clearly declared. On the labels at the food boat and on the counter the following abbreviations tell you about specific ingredients: V = vegan, O = egg, L = lacto, N = nuts, S = celeriac, G = gluten. About 90% of our cold dishes are vegan. The hot section consists of 12 different menus, snacks, side dishes and vegetables of which four to eight are vegan every day. Besides fresh fruit we have a small but exclusive selection of four to five desserts. Apart from our freshly baked vegan Apple Turnover you will find two guaranteed vegan desserts on our food boat.?

They are open every day from early morning to quite late which is great fro travellers! As you can see from the photos below we had a range of options available. Our favourites were the pakoras, onion rings, tofu salad, lentil salad and wild rice salad. They also have a beautiful Rooibos tea with vanilla, which we bought a packet of to take home with us!!!

We found this place on Wiki Travel and decided to check it out even though it is not vegan or vegetarian exclusively anymore. They do have a couple of organic meat options on the menu but are primarily vegetarian and always have vegan options of their daily changing menu. It was described on Wiki travel as a Traditional left-wing / punk-run restaurant. This place was packed all weekend long and the meals were pretty good!

Giant Mushroom with oven vegetables

Borschtsch (white cabbage beetroot soup with pureed smoked tofu)

Filo pastry triangle with sweet and sour sauce

Seitan schnitzel with mashed potato, red cabbage and cognac sauce

Hummus and roasted eggplant wrap

Avocado and chickpea patties with vegetable rice and tomato currant chutney

Sour Lentils with spätzle and tofu wieners

Another shop we discovered on Wiki Travel was a specialty dark chocolate shop. I knew we had to go! Here is a photo of our tasty loot!

There isn?t much on offer at traditional Christmas markets for vegans but we did manage to find these babies. Organic Marzipan and Viennese/German nougat (which is essentially a chocolate and nut, usually hazelnut, praline and vegan?. and 100% yum).

tibits Basel

Stänzlergasse 4, 4051 Basel

http://www.tibits.ch/e/restaurants-take-away/basel/

Restaurant Hirscheneck

Lindenberg 23 4058 Basel

http://www.hirscheneck.ch/das-restaurant.html

Choco Loco

Spalenberg 38a, 4051 Basel

http://chocoloco-shop.ch/