Please note: This article was first published on The Vegan Tourist and last updated January 21, 2012.
Veggie & Organic London is another good read for vegetarians who are planning a trip to London. I like it because it provides useful information not just about vegetarian restaurants and shops, but also about restaurants that use organic ingredients to prepare their food, and stores which sell organic products.
I generally prefer vegetarian guidebooks, which don’t include traditional restaurants, like The Vegan Guide to New York City. Unfortunately, most vegetarian guidebooks include restaurants that cater to omnivores, if those restaurants provide a good selection of vegetarian dishes.
I don’t find those kinds of guides quite as useful, but I like this one: all the traditional restaurants in this book use at least some organic ingredients to prepare their dishes. Organic farming is something I want to support, so I don’t mind eating at traditional restaurants, if I know that they use organic meat, fish, eggs, and milk products.
Just like Vegetarian London, this book is also divided into five sections – Central, North, West, South and East London – and the sections are further divided into smaller neighbourhoods.
This guidebook also provides additional information about shops, accommodation, caterers, animal welfare groups, farmers markets, cooking classes, and the like. It’s geared not just towards tourists, but also very useful for Londoners.
Veggie & Organic London was a good read, but in the end, I decided not to bring it with me. I found the information in Vegetarian London better suited to my needs. I’m first and foremost interested in vegetarian restaurants, and if I had to choose between a vegetarian and an organic restaurant, I’d always choose the vegetarian one.
Veggie & Organic London was published in 2009, and there doesn’t seem to be a website where information is updated on a regular basis. So expect this book to be somewhat out of date.