Saturday, September 29, 2018

Eating Out Vegan at Chain Restaurants

When Brixx Pizza closed in our town, it left a bit of a hole for our family. We don't eat a chain restaurants much, but Brixx was an easy option when we were eating out with friends or nice place for the boys to take their girlfriends on dates. Parker has never dated a vegetarian and Dema dated one vegetarian, but it was still nice to go someplace where everyone had easy, yummy options. 

Fortunately, Blaze Pizza was being built as Brixx closed their doors. Blaze is even better, in some ways. Most of my family loves to pile on the toppings so it is nice to not have to pay per topping. The staff has always been great about the vegan thing and since you talk to them about what toppings you want they can put just the right amount of everything on your pizza.
Josie likes to add a lot of toppings to her pizza. This one has red onions, mushrooms, spinach, pineapple, zucchini, kalamata olives,  chopped garlic, artichokes, vegan cheese, spicy red sauce, and oregano. She loves that they also have healthier drink options like hibiscus tea.
Dema is more of a simple topping guy with black olives, pineapple, and vegan cheese.
 Dema is the one in the family who just wants two or three toppings on his pizza and they can do that too.
This was my pizza and was very similar to Josie's.
This was our first visit so I didn't know about the arugula and other post-cooking toppings. I always add arugula now. We like talking to the friendly staff and deciding in the moment what toppings we want, but we've also used the online app to order ahead.

Josie had a birthday sleepover for her 11th birthday. Usually, we are at the beach for Josie's birthday so she hasn't had a party with her friends for years. Only one of the girls was veg, but I ordered vegan Blaze pizzas online and picked them up. All the girls loved them and it was much cheaper than other pizza options we've done for other parties in the past!

At the same time Blaze was being built, there was another restaurant in the same area with a similar look. Rob and I finally checked it out. CoreLife Eatery is now added to our go to list. It was so nice to be able to grab a quick bowl of veggies and quinoa goodness! It isn't as vegan friendly as you would think but the handful of options seem pretty solid.
Sriracha Ginger Tofu with Ancient Grains from CoreLife Eatery.
The kids, especially Josie, have been asking to check out CoreLife. I'll let you know how they like it.
Update: Huge thumbs up from Josie. We went just the two of us and we got a Sriracha Ginger Tofu with Ancient Grains bowl (see green beauty above) and a Shiitake Mushroom Roasted Tofu broth bowl. We "shared" them both, but Josie definitely ate more than half of both. So good!

2 comments:

Éphée Lafée said...

All those pizzas look perfect! Specially Josie's one!
What kind of vegan cheese do they use?

VeganLinda said...

Good question! I don't think it is Daiya, but I don't know for sure. They keep it away from the rest of the cheese (which is awesome). I'll ask the next time we are there.