Doing Web Summit Vegan

At last year’s Web Summit, I was surprised to find that local restaurants and cafes were better for vegan options than the forward-thinking and environmentally conscious conference.

Despite the CEO of This (producer of vegan meat alternatives, and notably the best vegan bacon I’m aware of) talking at Web Summit, Media Catering’s vegan options were often sub-par or non-existent – I recall one particular breakfast when whole pieces of fresh fruit were the only vegan option.

Lovely though November pears might be in Portugal, they alone aren’t enough to sustain you through a hard day of blogging and podcasting.

The area immediately surrounding my budget hotel in Alameda certainly feels less touristy. I found a little restaurant there with a couple really excellent and inexpensive vegan options, and returned there every night for dinner.

After the conference finished, I stayed in Lisbon for an extra night and explored the city a little. I tried a vegan restaurant near Baixa-Chiado called Veganapati.

Vaganapati served a whole range of vegan options including a tofu-based reinvention of a traditional portuguese fish dish. Which was fantastic, incidentally.

Baixa-Chiado is very touristy but when I asked a waitress at Veganapati whether their customers skewed more towards locals or tourists, she told me it was a fairly even split.

This year, I’m staying at the same hotel and I’m pleased to find a vegan cafe two minutes walk away. Pequeno Café e Bistrô.

The menu is most prominently in Portuguese, rather than English, and I anecdotally  heard more customers order in Portuguese than English.

I’ve often been told that traveling vegan is somewhere between hard and impossible, and that traveling vegan inevitably means not exploring local cuisine. As if veganism was a construction of anglophone liberalism.

My experience in Lisbon last year made me seriously question this wisdom. It definitely seemed like vegan food was marketed equally, or more so, towards Lisbon locals and that vegan restaurants provided options for those wanting to explore traditional portuguese fare.
Will the vegan options at Web Summit’s Media Catering this year match up to vegan options offered by and for Lisbon’s local residents? Probably not, but I’ll let you know. Tags: Websummit