Vegie Bowl – Springvale – an all out vegetarian restaurant with mock meat

Vegie Bowl is for vegetarians or people wanting to give the food a go. What Vegie Bowl does is provide a normal menu you’d expect at a Chinese restaurant with usual suspects like Sweet and Sour Pork, Stonepot Beef Brisket, and Black Pepper Chicken. The main difference, as you would expect, is that there is no actual meat used in the dishes – they use exclusively mock meat.

Vegie Bowl is located just close enough to the horrendous Springvale Junction, that infamous junction responsible for the highest number of traffic incidents and confusion. But if you are coming from the south east, you can avoid is by parking a few shops away. But if you want to risk life and limb, you’ll need to navigate your way through the junction. And there is fortunately onsite parking.

The entrance to the restaurant has stairs on one side and an accessibility ramp on the other side.

Browsing the menu, you can quickly spot that they refer to dishes as pork or chicken, but you have to accept that all foods will be vegetarian. And there is also the option for vegans if you leave out the egg.

It took awhile before we could order our dishes, but when we did we ordered Fried Rice with Honey “Chicken” and Char Kway Teo (fried rice noodles).

We were also able to get hot jasmine tea for the table.

The dishes were interesting to taste. The Fried Rice with Honey “Chicken” was the better of the two dishes, because the fried rice had the nice wok-hey toss and the battered “chicken” was definitely not chicken but some sort of taro-like substance that tasted okay. Normal chicken would be better, but it wasn’t awful.

The Char Kway Teo on the other hand was a bit boring. It needed something to give life to the strands of rice noodles on the plate.

The serving size for both dishes was very decent and could easily be shared with the table. I think it’s a safe beat to order Vegetarian Fried Rice, but the mock meats is something I’m okay with but still prefer the usual meats.

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