There's no skirting around the subject; eating vegan when I was in Romania for Electric Castle festival was tough. Most days I lived off of packed lunches after seeking out the local Lidl or just opted for chips or crisps. Basically, I consumed a lot of potatoes during my four days in Cluj-Napoca. However, one afternoon after a frantic Google search, we found Samsara Foodhouse, an entirely vegetarian and vegan restaurant, was just a 10-minute walk away from St. Michael's church.
Samsara is an absolute haven of vegan food with an extensive entirely vegetarian and vegan menu. Whilst the inside of the restaurant is small, it's incredibly intimate and you almost feel as if you've stepped inside someone's home. Out the front of house, however, is a huge covered terrace overlooked by a colourful mural where you can dine al fresco in the warmer months.
The food menu is more like a book than a simple menu and offers everything from wholesome pasta dishes, pizza, stir fries, vegetable curries, sushi and it even has a raw menu for the more conscious foodies amongst us. Oh, and there's an incredible dessert selection available too! Just have a little browse through their vegan friendly menu here and you may just end up planning a trip to Romania. After a few days of surviving on fries and crisps, finding Samsara was an absolute godsend and I was absolutely overwhelmed with choice!
In all honesty, I wanted to eat absolutely everything as there was just so much choice, but unfortunately my Electric Castle hangover that day had my stomach feeling a little on edge so I couldn't order as much as I wanted. To start, we ordered some houmous with focaccia because when is houmous ever a bad idea?
Considering my hangover that day, my body was in serious need of all the carbs so the pasta dishes were particularly enticing. I opted for the tofu and cashew cream pasta topped with olive oil, garlic, oregano, yeast flakes, lemon and a dash of salt. That pasta dish was exactly what I needed at that moment in time and brought me back to life; maybe that was the mojito that I ordered alongside it though?
For dessert, I opted for the melon vegan ice cream with agave syrup, which was the perfect palette cleanser at the end of my meal. The portion was pretty generous and I could have easily shared it but I obviously didn't!
We dined with a large group that included some meat-eaters but even they couldn't stop gushing about how incredible the food was! Between myself and James, we ordered: three coffees, one cocktail, a beer, houmous with focaccia, two mains (James had a vegetarian pizza option) and one dessert and the total for both of us worked out to the equivalent of just £22!
Now, if that's not enough to tempt you into booking a flight to Cluj-Napoca then I don't know what is!
Find Samsara Foodhouse
Address: Strada Ștefan Ludwig Roth 5, Cluj-Napoca 400124, Romania
When I went to Romania I loooooovvvvveeeeeeeed this restauraunt! It's still one of my all time favourites. I want to go back just for this place. I found it really easy to eat vegan in Romania actually x
ReplyDeleteDid you? I struggled so much but to be fair, we spent most of our time on-site at Electric Castle and there were like no options at all!
DeleteOh wow, the food looks amazing, I would love to visit Romania one day
ReplyDelete