I love hitting up the Chocks Away Cafe at Tollerton Airport for lunch. They do all the usual cafe and greasy spoon options that you might expect, but what you might not have known is that they also have a really extensive Vegan and Vegetarian Menu as well.
As you my have gathered from most of my posts I am not in the V camp but I do like to try everything that is on offer to scoff, so I have spent a couple of more recent visits to the cafe checking out the Vegan and Vegetarian Options.
Vegan Breakfast Menu
The Vegan breakfasts are named in the same way as their meaty counterparts here at Chocks Away. They all have Plane names and the bigger the plane the bigger the brekkie, so as always you pick from the Tomahawk, the Jumbo, and the Hercules. As per usual I found myself heading for the Jumbo, feeling not to greedy, but just wanting a bit more.
The menu describes the Vegan Jumbo as being comprised of “2 Veggie Sausages, 2 homemade seitan bacon, scrambled tofu, beans, tomatoes, mushrooms, 2 toast with dairy free spread and a free tea”
Vegan Jumbo Breakfast
My first impressions were how colourful the plate was when it arrived, and then that it was not at all pretty which pleased me no end. I like to think that a Greasy Spoon style cooked breakfast is not supposed to be displayed like a fine art painting on a canvas. It is supposed to come with the feeling that it was just ladled onto the plate ready to be scoffed. I just need to be able to see where everything is and have easy access to all the components.
The Seitan bacon was kind of like a meat pancake, it doesn’t really have that meaty texture but had the sort of smoked flavour you might expect. If you didn’t look too closely you would probably pass it off inside a Vegan bacon butty. I thought it was ok to be fair
The Vegetarian Sausage had the textures of a sausage down ok, funnily enough it had the texture and appearance of a herby chicken sausage. I quite liked these bangers and I would happily eat these again meat or no meat, they were tasty
The scrambled tofu taking the place of the ‘eggs’ was really yellow. I wasn’t 100% or really any percent sure what was in it, I kind of thought I got a hint of turmeric which could explain the yellowness. There were bits of chopped scallion (spring onion) mixed into the tofu scramble as well which added a little crunch and flavour. It was a decent substitute for the real thing.
Beans. Mushrooms, Tomato were all present as expected on the plate and all added a bit of breakfast feel to the non meat items as I was spooning stuff up. The toast was used, as it always should be used, for scooping up of excess bean and tomato juice.
All in all, a good effort on the plate and if I had just turned Vegan and wanted my fix of a classic breakfast ‘down the cafe’ I would be happy with this plate. If I was being a healthy vegan type I probably would not not have admitted scoffing so much 🙂
Vegetarian Breakfast Menu
If you don’t want go fully vegan but still want to cut out the meat they do all of the same stuff basically with eggs on the Vegetarian Breakfast section of the menu.
Vegetarian Jumbo Breakfast
On an earlier visit, Ant, one of MyFoodHunt eating partner’s in crime had tried out the Vegetarian Jumbo which was just the same as the Vegan version only he had fried eggs instead. It was his brunchtime scoffing and recommendation of the Seitan bacon and Vegetarian Sausage that had persuaded me to take on the Full Vegan effort that I stuffed down at the top of the post 🙂
The thing that delights me the most about this photograph I took is the dangerously close proximity of bean juice and of tomato juice to the fried eggs 🙂
More Vegetarian and Vegan Options
Elsewhere on the Vegan and Vegetarian sections of the Chocks Away menu they offer up many, if not all, of the classic cafe dishes as meatfree and dairy free options. I am quite curious to try many of these dishes too.
I do love a good toastie, or to be honest toaties in general, and the idea of a ‘Seitan Bacon and Vegan Cheese‘ toastie sounds interesting, as do the ‘Filthy Fries‘ ‘smothered with vegan cheese, onions, mushrooms, seitan bacon & crispy onions‘
No Bull Burger
In the end though I had ordered really simply getting the “No Bull Burger with salad, mayo & chips” for £6. Looking back I probably should have gone for something a bit more different than just a burger, but having said that you know how much I love a burger so the chances are that i was always getting this at some point anyway 🙂
OK so burger wise, it was just some sort of vegetable mixture formed into a crispy disc. I was not really much to write home about but it did the job and I have had worse meaty burgers.
If you like your salad then you will probably like this, as you can see there is plenty of it. Red, Green, yellow chopped pepper, cucumber. lettuce and a lot of mayo that I added myself.
Chips wise you got a good half plate full of the side and if you like frozen chips and are not that fussy you will be fine with these ones. I was kind of wishing that I had got the burger with the ‘Filthy Fries’ too, but maybe that was an adventure for the future instead 🙂
“Chocks Away” is located at Nottingham City Airport just off Tollerton Ln, Tollerton, Nottingham NG12 4GA.
It is well signposted from the road, but the road seems to be going nowhere once you turn off, so just keep driving down that long green road until you get to the Airport Car Park and Tower, then follow the sign through the door and keep on going until you smell the food cooking in the café 🙂
Check them out on their Facebook Page as well to see what they have on offer.