There’s a lot to like about Iran. The people are some of the most hospitable I’ve encountered anywhere in the world, the architecture and history are amazing, and the cities are adorned with lush parks. But one bugbear of my short stay there was the difficulty in getting vegetarian food.

I’d been pre-briefed that Iran was tough for vegetarians, so I memorised the Farsi phrase for “I am vegetarian” on the plane trip into Tehran. My first chance to use it came the next day in a local restaurant.

“Man sabzi khor am”, I told the friendly restaurant owner.

“Ahhh” he said, nodding in understanding while looking at me as though I were crazy. He pointed to a dish on his menu, which helpfully had an English translation. It read “vegetable stew.” I nodded happily. Soon after he returned with a plate of colourful saffron rice and a big bowl of a lentil stew with vegetables. I dug my spoon into it, but was puzzled to pull out a brown, fleshy chunk. Was it eggplant? Or fake meat? No! It was mutton and it was all through the “vegetarian” stew. 

After this experience I decided that my approach of claiming to be vegetarian was too subtle.

I wrote out this message, and had a friend in Tehran translate it into Farsi for me. Showing it to restaurants generally got the message through and led to one of three scenarios.

1. The restaurant manager politely apologised and explained that they had no vegetarian food and could not feed us.
2. More commonly, the restaurant manager assured us they had a vegetarian stew, by which they meant that they would try to pick out the meat of their most vegetarian stew before serving us, not always successfully.
3. The restaurant manager asked the chef to make up a special vegetarian dish from scratch (none were on the menu). These were always delicious and gratefully received.

The challenge for vegetarians is eating out. 99% of local restaurants had no vegetarian dishes on their main menu, and no vegetarian mezzes as in the Middle East. Some had dishes that were described as a “vegetable” stew but in our experience they weren’t vegetarian.

The main problem was that restaurants seemed to make their dishes in advance, rather than fresh, so if the dish had meat in it they couldn’t modify it to suit vegetarian needs.

Spot the difference: One of these vegetable stews is not vegetarian.

We didn’t hit upon a perfect method for getting vegetarian food in Iran. However, our most successful strategies were:

• Showing the waiting staff our Farsi phrases, particularly the request for a dish without meat or fish. I recommend printing off these photos and sticking them to a business card, or else getting a friendly Iranian to write it out for you when you first arrive.
• Having food made up fresh, rather than ordering off the menu. Vegetable casseroles or vegetable kebabs were the two dishes that kitchens could usually whip up.
• Eating non-Iranian food. Pizza is huge in Iran, especially in Shiraz. Because it is always made up for the customer we had no problem getting a vegetarian version. The tomato sauce and mayonnaise that came with it took some getting used to.
•  There is also an Indian population in Iran, at least in the larger cities. Indian food and restaurants were a safe source for vegetarian food.
• Larger hotel restaurants often put on a salad buffet at lunch and dinner. The buffet is predominantly vegetarian and has lots of fresh salad ingredients and a choice of dressing. You can have a meal of just the buffet, although on our bill at one hotel this was described as “order without food”, which sums up the Iranian view of a meal without meat.
• Buy fresh bread and vegetables and make your meal yourself. There are plenty of good fresh food sellers in Iran. Some hotels will let you use their kitchen or rent apartments with kitchenettes, but you can always make great sandwiches at a pinch.

The vegetable kebab is your friend.

Of all the countries I’ve visited, Iran was the most challenging for a vegetarian because of the lack of vegetarian food in restaurants and the lack of understanding of what vegetarianism means amongst restaurant staff. The saddest part was that it was hard for us to experience authentic Iranian food because so much of it was inaccessible to us. However, amongst the horror there were some great vegetarian experiences and we generally found that with persistence and patience we got a vegetarian meal in the end.

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Egyptian restaurants offer a mixed bag of experiences for vegetarians.If you’re happy to go local and eat at cheap, no frills places then vegetarian food is plentiful.

A Canadian expat who writes the excellent Living in Egypt blog recently summed up local food in a comment on my blog:

Most of the mezze dishes in Egyptian restaurants are vegetarian, such things as cheese with tomato, aubergines fried or pickled, bessara (a pate of fava beans served cold with friend onions on top), and so on. That’s because the traditional cooking is and was vegetarian with meat being something only eaten once a week. The basic food of Egypt is foul and taameya, which provides much of the population with its ‘go’.

We came across all the dishes Maryanne recommends during our stay in Egypt, although it was easier to find good, local restaurants in Cairo than in smaller places that cater predominantly for tourists, such as Luxor.

One of the more interesting dishes we tried was bessara. This is a pureed form of the spiced beans used in taminya .

However, go upmarket (and / or to a tourist restaurant) and the vegetarian options will dwindle at the same rate as the cash in your wallet.

A typical Egyptian restaurant catering to tourists will have a salad section of the menu, a main section of the menu, and dessert. Some will also have a “vegetable” or “side dish” section.

Salad is a potentially misleading category for Westerners travelling in the Middle East. Most “salad” dishes are actually dips, usually baba ghanouj (served creamy here), tahini, cheese and tomato (the pink dip in the above photo) and maybe yoghurt with cucumber pieces.

If you prefer a salad which is fresh and green, the safest bet is an “oriental salad” which is finely diced cucumber and tomato pieces, often with a lemon dressing.

The mains section of the menu in a tourist restaurant is usually a hopeless cause for vegetarians. Slide your finger along the list of kebabs and meat stews, and you might be lucky enough to find a vegetable casserole.

This is sometimes called moussaka or Egyptian moussaka, and occasionally just “vegetable”. This is a pretty reliable, and generally tasty dish. It has a tomato base, and the vegetables in it include potato, eggplant and zucchini, though these vary. (The cheese and tomato decoration in the picture above are unusual, but unfortunately most restaurants were “atmospherically” lit and my more authentic photos didn’t turn out).

It is not unusual for this to be the only vegetarian choice on the mains / side dish section - although in one restaurant in Aswan we found about three - four vegetable side dishes (each in the same tomato sauce, but with only a single type of vegetable per dish).

In tourist places catering for a more alternative crowd (i.e. Dahab) most restaurants have a vegetarian section on their menu, and will offer three - four choices. The moussaka here is usually good. Some of the others… not so much.

Fortunately, one area where even Egyptian tourist restaurants can’t go too far wrong is dessert. The most ubiquitous dish is called Om Ali, which is pastry cooked with cream (I thought it was like bread and butter pudding). While not the most attractive dish in the world, it tastes homely and definitely fills a hole.

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Fuul and Koshary aren’t the only vegetarian fast food gems in Egypt. Once you’ve had your fill of beany goodness, you can always turn to ta’ aminya (the Egyptian word for felafel) or fiteer.

Fiteer is a local dish that’s described alternately as pizza or pancake. It’s somewhere between, but not actually either, of the two. The dough is very light (like golzeme, but thicker) and surrounds the filling like a calzone (but much thinner).

There are a lot of possible savoury fillings, including vegetable, mushroom and cheese, but fiteer can also be a sweet dish, served with jam or sugar.

We deferred trying felafel in Egypt in favour of the unique local vegetarian delicacies. However, once we tasted the felafel in Cairo we regretted our decision.

Egyptian felafel is great! The inside is left soft and very green, and the mixture is heavily spiced making sure you get a hit of flavour alongside the usual “just been deep fried” taste. Whole sesame seeds are scattered on top, which gives it extra flavour and a prettier appearance than the usual brown felafel balls.

There are some felafel shops on Egyptian streets, but less so than in other parts of the Middle East. Instead, felafel often comes served plain on a plate in local restaurants - perfect for mopping up some tahini dip with freshly baked bread.

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Fuul is a simple dish of cooked fava beans that is ubiquitous in Egypt. It can be served for all three meals, and comes in endless variations.

It’s most basic incarnation is unseasoned whole beans cooked in their juices, and served with bread. Seasoning it with salt is a radical improvement, and it will sometimes come with other flavourings like soft cheese. One of the few good things about our Egyptian bus ride from hell was that the one roadhouse we stopped at in our ten hour journey served only fuul, so at least we had something vegetarian that we could eat.

Fuul can also come pre-seasoned with salt and spices as a paste, which I preferred. My favourite fuul moment was in a small, local restaurant in downtown Cairo called Akher Sa’a, where our spiced fuul paste came with fresh bread, tahini dip and mashed potatoes. Yum!

In Cairo there are chains of popular Egyptian restaurants, for example Gad and Falfela. These places often offer fuul in about 5 - 8 different ways. For example, it can be mixed with tahini sauce…

…served with fresh salad on top (green or red capsicum is a popular addition and often the default if you get fuul as part of an “Egyptian banquet” on a cruise ship or at a tourist hotel)

or even served with a “special sauce” with fresh herbs.

Fuul is vegan by default, and even the special variations are generally meat and dairy free. This fact, and its ready availability, make it a great option for vegetarians, particularly those who like eating locally.

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Eating vegetarian food in Egypt is all about economics. The cheapest eateries in Egypt often offer only a single dish, which is usually vegetarian. In local restaurants, where food is a fast, cheap, volume business, about the half the menu will be vegetarian including many of the most popular dishes. However, once you crack the expensive and / or tourist orientated places vegetarian food is scarce and sometimes non-existent.

Nothing illustrates this better than koshary.

Koshary is a very popular Egyptian dish that is made by mixing rice, vermicelli noodles, chickpeas, brown lentils, and maccaroni, then covering it with dried fried onion and tomato sauce. It reminded me of the kind of comfort food I’d make on a Friday night, when I have nothing in the cupboard but odds and ends. As comfort food has been hard to come by these last few months, it was a real pleasure to find a country that’s elevated it to the status of a national dish.

Koshary is served in dedicated “koshary houses”, which are distinguished by the large silver vats in the window which hold the various ingredients. Many koshary places serve nothing else, though you can choose which size dish you’d like. Although the ingredients are standard, the taste varies from place to place. My favourite variation was adding chilli to the tomato sauce, or else serving the koshary with a small side dish of chilli sauce.

Koshary is full of carbohydrates, but is pleasantly low on oil and fats because most of the ingredients are boiled. Small dishes of Koshary generally cost 2 - 3 Egyptian pounds, and large dishes cost between 4 - 5 Egyptian pounds (i.e. 50c). Koshary is eaten for lunch and dinner, and is a great vegetarian alternative to expensive, and generally disappointing tourist meals in Egypt.

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I didn’t have high hopes for Jordan, seeing it as a way of getting from Syria to Egypt rather than a destination in its own right. However I soon discovered it has a lot of diverse attractions, not least of which is the fabulous array of food on offer in the capital, Amman.

Amman is not a beautiful city. It lacks the atmosphere and history of Damascus or the buzz of Cairo, but its (relatively) tolerant attitude and full spectrum of restaurants make it a great place to revive after travelling in neighbouring countries. In fact, I had three of my favourite Middle Eastern food experiences during our time in Amman.

We began our food therapy at the Blue Fig, an elegant, modern restaurant cum bar in the new part of Amman. The lighting is low, patrons are uber fashionable, and the world food is expensive, but worth it.

We salivated over the menu, which had a good selection of vegetarian food, but eventually opted for a fresh salad with a honey mustard dressing and two huge pizzas with thick, hand made dough and exotic toppings like guacomole and sour cream, washed down with a beer and glass of white wine (a luxury after our largely dry trip through Syria). For dessert we splurged and had a green tea and mint creme brulee, which was divine. After two months in the Middle East it was a real treat to try different flavours and good quality fresh food.

Our next memorable food experience was the polar opposite of the Blue Fig, but equally enjoyable. In the heart of downtown Amman is Hashem, a local restaurant in a small alleyway opposite the Cliff Hotel. We were waved in by the friendly staff, and seated at the last available table. There is no menu because only a few dishes are served. Conveniently, they are all vegetarian!

In a couple of minutes we had freshly cooked felafel, a mound of soft pitta bread, a bowl of fuul, and a plate of hummus. Each dish was delicious - particularly the creamy hummus and lightly spiced fuul.

Our meals came with a glass of tea, and the entire bill was about 1 dinah - or A$1.60. Given a bottle of water cost 1 - 2 dinahs, this meal was an absolute bargain as well as being a great vegetarian experience. Definitely a Super V.

For our last night we wanted to visit a special restaurant, and were recommended Fakhr el-din. This extremely popular Lebannese place is located in a beautifully restored villa. Normally a booking is necessary, but we were lucky to be able to walk in and receive one of the few remaining tables.

While the mains were largely free of vegetarian food, there was a very extensive list of mezzes, many of which were vegetarian. We tried four dishes, and each was delicious, but the standouts were potato kibbeh and spinach pastries.

The potato kibbeh was mashed potato seasoned with olive oil, burghul, spices and plenty of salt. It was served cold, in hand formed small sausage-like shapes. I preferred this to the lentil kibbeh we had tried in Istanbul and Damascus.

The spinach pies were remarkably fresh tasting. Rather than the flaky or filo pastry we were expecting, the casing was a light dough which was baked rather than fried. Inside, juicy spinach in garlic was packed in and you seasoned the pastry with fresh lemon juice.

Even though Andy and I were looking decidedly backpacker compared with the other patrons, the waiter was extremely friendly and gave us good advice about eating the meal and choosing food and wine. This was a lovely way to round off our time in Amman, and a fitting end to what turned out to be one of the dining capitals of the Middle East.

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Forget the MCG. Adelaide vegetarians and footy lovers might be interested in an upcoming event at Sarah’s Cafe on Leigh Street which combines the cities favourite pastimes: AFL, music and good food.

The inaugural Grand Final Day (Sept. 29) Jazz Vs Footy Live Jazz event will see live jazz improvised to the one game of the year.

There will be competitions, such as who you think will win at the end of each quarter, and half time entertainment in the form of live and heavily improvised stand up comedy by local boy Mark Trenwith, best know for his show “Be my friend” in the last Adelaide fringe.

The best bit is that a big, tasty and purely veggie BBQ will be held in the beer garden, which will also be entirely non-smoking. Right on!

Entry is $10 at the door (plus what you want when you get inside).

With two Adelaide teams in the finals (go Crows) this is almost worth coming home early for!

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