It’s been seven months of living in Milan, and I think I’ve had plenty of pasta and pizza to satisfy my authentic Italian cuisine checklist.
What I truly miss are foods that are “sacrilegious” here, like pineapple pizza or bagel breakfast sandwiches made with eggs and cheese.
Not exactly my vegan favorites, but man do I miss the plethora of vegan options that were in Los Angeles...
Back when I ran a food-focused, lifestyle blog (Will Study for Food), I made it a priority to check out restaurants and write full reviews on them. It was something I truly enjoyed, and while I never got to an extreme level of “food influencer”, I was able to connect with local restaurants from time-to-time to participate in tastings, or review products from food companies that got in contact with me.
But I soon grew tired of constantly posting about food. My blog post format was starting to get repetitive because seriously, there’s only so many ways you can be creative when it comes to writing food reviews 🤷🏽♀️.
Since starting Second Gen Desi and moving abroad, I have started to miss my food blogging days, but here in Milan, I wasn’t in the mood to take pictures of every caffè or brioche I stumbled upon.
But since coming here, I realized it would be fun to at least try foods from local restaurants that I could group into a “category” for a later blog posts.
I thought that it could perhaps provide some fun during these dreary times, and especially help restaurants survive via the delivery services I started to use on the daily 😅
So with this in mind, I scoured the land for whatever vegan restaurants I could find. One I had the chance to dine-in at, twice, in the summer before everything went COVID-crazy again.
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So if you are vegan in Milan and are struggling with options, or you’re somewhere else in the world and find it unbelievable that the land of formaggio and proscuitto even has vegan options, scroll on down to see what I ended up finding 👇🏽!
1 ) Flower Burger (dine-in, Porta Venezia location)
I knew of Flower Burger even before coming to Italy, when I still participated in the food blogging-charade and stumbled across someone’s IG post featuring a plate of colorful vegan burgers. I remember saving the post under a file where I archived any intriguing restaurants outside of the US—in case I ever happened to travel to a particular country, I was ready with my “where-to-chow-down” list.
It’s amusing that I ended up eventually visiting Flower Burger, twice!
My second visit was in early September, on a weekday evening after work. I came prepared to order in Italian and not use my Bank of America credit card (not that using that particular card was a bad thing, but it was a dead-giveaway to the cashier that I was not an Italian native and a give-away that I was not a native Italian speaker…)
In this visit, I was successful in ordering an Ocean Burger—their special edition burger outfitted in a bright teal bun, sandwiching some good fixin’s including lettuce, tomatoes, guacamole, a thick quinoa patty, and a mayo-type sauce called “beach sauce”.
The burger came paired with patate savory (potato wedges), but I didn’t think to ask for an extra order of sauce.
This is something I’ve realized about Italians—they skimp when it comes to saucing their carbs!
Besides the “dry” potato situation, Flower Burger’s burgers were, in my mind, the go-to for vegan burgers in all of Milano.
That is, until lockdowns happened again in late October, and I discovered a new guy in town…
2) Black Out Burgers by Avo Brothers
I was scrolling through Deliveroo, an app that has gotten me through Italy’s oscillating restrictions, in early November when I first spotted BOB.
Unlike Flower Burger, they didn’t seem to have a brick-and-mortar store nor was their entire menu vegan-friendly. What made some of their selections vegan-friendly was using Beyond Burger in their “normal” dishes, but it was something else that made my eyes pop:
Britney’s No Chicken Burger
I was able to save a *bit* of money by making it a meal, getting some sweet potato fries on the side, TWO sauce cups, and a can of ice cold acqua frizzante.
The bag it came in helped me figure out why my burger was Britney’s (like, Britney Spears?)
Wowwww, oh wow—this meal was demanding to compete with what Flower Burger had to offer. The fries were incredibly sweet and earthy, and I made a wise choice by getting BBQ sauce and paprika mayo on the side for dipping. I was also able to request plant-based cheddar for the burger, the patty of which was incredibly crispy.
Anyone who says they can’t stand veggie/vegan burgers because they taste awful, and that they prefer the “real thing”, needs to try this. And be proved wrong.
From that point on, I ordered least one meal from BOB each week, usually on Monday nights since it served as a good pick-me-up for having to start a new work week.
I even raved about BOB on a vegan and vegetarian’s group chat I’m a part of with other expat women in the city 😂:
I gave BOB excellent reviews for quite a while after my first order, but when they made an egregious error regarding the last order I placed with them, that tampered with my trust.
Due to an order mix-up, I opened my bag to find a lovely beefy burger, and I decided to call it quits. Thankfully I caught it, but I was put-off from their lack of integrity and awareness for the customer.
I guess it was good while it lasted.
3) Avo Brothers
During my BOB obsession, I did take a break and order from the OG Avo Brothers.
Their menu had refreshing options like salads, bowls, and (vegan) desserts!
I opted for the Lolita Bowl, which wasn’t exactly vegan due to the halloumi cheese (which could always be taken out), but I went for it as is, keeping it vegetarian with the cheese.
I can see why it’s one of their most popular bowls (it says so on Deliveroo). It’s packed with spinach, avocado, purple cabbage, tomatoes, squash, beet hummus, and sunflower seeds 🤩
As far as the guilt-free brownie though….if I had known it would be so soft, chewy, and flavorful, I would have ordered at least….three? 🤣
4) Soulgreen
Soulgreen seems to be well-known by vegan expats here (at least based on the one chat group I’m in…), but from all of the times I’ve ordered from here, I haven’t been able to get away from the Falafel Wrap.
It’s an unassuming dish, with no fancy fillings, but it’s one of my favorites. Since it comes with potato wedges and ketchup (finally, a place in Milan that understands that some sort of condiment is essential when it comes to potato wedges and the sort 🙌🏽).
I’m used to falafel wraps with thick tahini-based sauces, but I was surprised by how the consistency was much like plain yogurt (very runny, and too runny for my liking).
I also wasn’t able to confirm if the sauce was dairy-free, so this ingredient might make this particular dish vegetarian rather than vegan.
5) MACHAPOKE
I was surprised to learn that sushi is incredibly popular in Milan, and in line with that, poke.
In LA, I always ended up doing a create-your-own type bowl if I ended up at a poke shop, so I could avoid the fish and get more of the other, better stuff 😉.
I was pleased to see that many of the poke shops on food delivery apps like Deliveroo offer vegetarian or even vegan bowls, and MACHAPOKE’s version is one of my favorites.
Their specific Vegan Poke bowl is so eye-catching—with a quinoa base, vegan burger balls (that actually look like falafel), avocado, broccoli, carrot, chickpeas, sunflower seeds, squash, and flaxseeds.
They threw in some chopsticks, soy sauce, and ginger, even though the bowl didn’t need it 😂. It was a struggle trying to get the last bits of quinoa with chopsticks, let me tell ya…
They also offer a vegan cheesecake, but since 75% of it is bland, it’s not worth a re-order. I didn’t expect the matcha layer to be too sweet, but I was hoping the middle layer would have been better in the sweet department (far from it). The bottom graham crust layer was the only part that was decent. Wish there had been more of that and not just like, 25%…
6) Cibo Vegan Food
Ah, Cibo Vegan Food—probably the most bland vegan outlet in all of Milan, and one of the priciest.
Due to a technical error on one weeknight, Deliveroo offered those who tried to place an order that evening a 5 euros off promo code to “make things right again”.
With that in hand, I could “splurge” a little and see if Cibo was worthy any hype.
Their menu was headache-inducing due to the Italian I had to comprehend after a long work day, but I ended up getting their vegan paella, a “cake” slice with pears and ginger, and “arancino di cereali misti”.
When my food arrived, I could tell not much work went into the packaging. I think the assumption that vegan places tend to be environmentally-friendly is an assumption gone awry…
The vegan paella was nothing special—just flavored rice with bite-size pieces of tofu and tempeh mixed in.
The “arancino” reminded me of a bland falafel—not even the “soy” sauce (basically hummus) could help it out of the flavorless black hole!
Oh, and the excuse-for-a-dessert that was the pere e zenzero cake slice. It could have been sweeter is an understatement…it needed to be dipped into a pool of sugar 😂
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Just like it’s possible to live in Los Angeles without a car, it’s possible to eat vegan in Milan, if that’s what you truly want! LA has far more options, but for a city in a traditional country with (ridiculous) food rules, the options that are available in Milan are decent.
Perhaps when these lockdowns ease down 🤞🏽🤞🏽🤞🏽 I’ll be more motivated to see what else I can find…