Vegan Chef Challenge Experience

October is a great month for vegans in the Sacramento area because of the Sacramento Vegan Chef Challenge. It’s a fabulous, month-long event where several restaurants in the area, ranging from casual to pricey fine dining, offer new vegan options on the menu for guests to try and rate. This year there are a lot of restaurants participating, enough to blow my dining out budget for the entire year if I wanted to challenge myself to try all the options. But that’s not realistic, I’ll be lucky to make it to just a few of them sadly. Tonight hubby and I ventured to the Tower Bridge Bistro because they’re offering a three course vegan dinner with many tempting options.

They even placed regular and vegan butter on the table to go with the bread, nice!

For the appetizer, I selected the Red Lentil Soup with Coconut Milk and Forbidden Rice (naughty!).

The soup was delicious with firm rice in the center topped with a slightly spicy herb mixture and spice blended into the soup.

For the main entree, I picked the Buckwheat Soba Noodles with Wasabi Miso Sauce, Tofu, and Bok Choy because eating out is a wonderful excuse to enjoy a little pasta.

The noodles were coated in a tangy and creamy wasabi sauce packing plenty of flavor in every bite.

And, as a vegan, there are few desserts I can enjoy when eating out because while many restaurants have decent vegan main dishes, most desserts include dairy in some form. So it was a real treat to have not one, but two vegan dessert choices in this menu. While the apple cake look good, the pistachio chocolate cake looked irresistible and I had to order it.

It’s a rich, dark chocolate cake with a caramel-like chocolate layer in the center and rich dark chocolate icing that’s coated in pistachios. I was a little worried the cake might be dry, but it wasn’t at all and there was plenty of chocolate sauce drizzled on the plate to coat bites with. Hubby and I cleaned the plate pretty promptly and had a lovely time sipping wine and chatting with a view of the river.

After our fabulously filling dinner, we headed out to the dock to take in the cool fall air and beautifully lit Tower Bridge.

The evening was such a treat and perfect fuel for my 6-mile run tomorrow morning. :-)