I love seeing vegan restaurants stay open. Lots of of favorite spots have heartbreakingly closed their doors recently (Modern Love, Seasoned Vegan, Champs, to name a few) and each time it happens, it feels like losing a best friend.
Luckily, we get to have Peacefood. It’s a place that’s always been reliably reliable: comforting dishes and a large dessert case of lots of sweet vegan goodness.
I don’t typically go to their original UWS location, but I found myself there on a sweltering Wednesday after going to a checkup for my beloved furbaby, Boba Pett. Tired and hungry, we were welcomed to an alfresco table where we tucked in to some toothsome tortilla chips and more!
This was my favorite dish out of everything I ate. The nachos are loaded with fresh guacamole and savory bean chili. They oddly had some radish slices(?) and olives in it too… maybe it’s a Mediterranean touch? The chips are clearly made in-house. It’s an easy and sharable app I highly recommend!
What used to be a regular item on the menu is now a special! Woe is the pot pie’s fall from grace!
I get that the pot pie might not have the panache to be a regular on the menu, but I personally love its understated charm. Admittedly, it’s not a complex dish, but nostalgically, it hits the spot. I didn’t ever grow up eating pot pies much in an Asian household, but my mom would sometimes buy them when they would be on sale (I forget the brand but it came in a red box with white lettering… can anyone remember the brand?) and it would be a fun, super-American treat.
Peacefood’s pot pie is nothing to write home about, but I love it nonetheless. The portion size is a little lacking but you can still feel happy while tearing off the flakly top crust and devouring the pea x carrot x chick’n filling. It’s not a dish I would ever make at home, nor is it a dish I see much of at all at other vegan restaurants, so I’m happy to indulge myself when I see it on Peacefood’s menu.
I salute the naming of all of their chick’n dishes “PFC” as it’s a cheeky nod to the detested omni franchise. However, this dish fell short of my hopes for it.
Portion-wise, it is nice and hefty and I even ended up having leftovers. Taste-wise, I was not impressed.
The gravy was lazily done (very liquid-y and unsatisfying), the cutlet was simply fried a bit (if it was breaded and deep fried it would have been better) and overall it just seemed like a dish I would easily be able to recreate at home. You can definitely skip this one (the other option is to have it be spaghetti squash instead of the PFC cutlet. I am not a fan of squash so that was a no-go for me).
To get the disappointment of the cutlet out of my mouth, I had to order a strawberry shortcake. I love Peacefood’s strawberry shortcake because of its unconventionality: it’s basically a large biscuit, sliced in half with a generous swirl of fresh strawberry icing in the middle and on top. Somehow it works perfectly: the biscuit is dry and a little salty, just enough to complement the icing in the middle to a t. It’s bar none my favorite dessert item Peacefood offers. I’ve also had their tiramisu, which excels in the portion / value department but doesn’t do it for me in the taste department. Keeping it simple is the key to success.
