Vegetarian food in Italy is awful!

[Teakettletrio]

We are five days into our trip. The place is beautiful, the scenery is stunning, the sights are fascinating. BUT the food is awful. We’ve had various combinations of cheese and tomatoes for 5 days straight. I’m starting to lose it. The supermarkets are full of gorgeous looking vegetables but all we get offered is spaghetti pomoforo, gnocchi pomodoro or margarita pizza. We got all excited yesterday as we thought we had found a restaurant with a veggie burger, but it turned out to be a potato croquet in a bun. Is it just us? Have we been unlucky?

I’m interested in whether the UK is better for vegetarians or is it easier because it’s home and you speak the language? I suspect, from previous posts, that vegetarians are not well catered for in Italy due to stocks, cheese and other flavouring

Well, you walk into the first restaurant you see in Italy and you get pasta pomodoro.

You walk into the first restaurant you see in the UK and you get a Beyond Meat burger 🙄

Doing a bit of research will get you something nicer in either country. The only way I would say the UK is better overall is that there are Indian restaurants everywhere, which are a godsend.

I’m not a vegetarian but it feels like the UK caters much better for vegetarians but that could be a totally false assumption. I suppose I’m thinking more about food shops rather than restaurants 🤷‍♀️

I don’t know if a Beyond Meat burger is a bad thing

Given my own username, I love yours!

There is a big difference between Italian vegetarian food - which is varied and delicious - and the food available to vegetarians on holiday, with no access to a kitchen.

Yes, there are plenty of Calabrian vegetarian dishes being consumed in Italian homes up and done the region. Cheap, healthy food. Trying to find a restaurant offering that is another thing.

Italians like to go out for pizza, for example, because who the hell has a wood fired oven at home and the time to prove the dough? Fritti are popular because getting out the deep fat frier at home is messy and time consuming.

I make a mean pasta e fagioli, but I know it's fully veggie because I cooked it. Vegetables and fruit in Italy are locally grown and a special kind of wonderful. That's not necessarily helpful in your hotel room.

Sorry, OP is in Campagna, right? Meh, same rules apply.

Can confirm it's an appalling thing!

Yes, in the UK it’s all fake meat (no thanks) pasta/risotto (no thanks again, I live in Italy, no desire to eat British pasta or risotto), or some over sweet beetroot or butternut squash based dish, with the ubiquitous goat’s cheese. No idea why everyone thinks vegetarians have a sweet tooth when it comes to veg. Bizarrely, I’ve always eaten badly as a vegetarian in the UK, unless in an actual vegetarian restaurant or non Brit cuisine. Pub grub is possibly the worst.

anyway, here up north (Italy) we do have a plethora of dishes suitable for vegetarians and indeed vegans as more and more Italians are veggie these days. Risotto - ask is the brodo vegetable broth. Often it is. Minestrone di legumi. Polenta or pasta with mushrooms. Frittate, sformati, torte salate - most contain no meat or indeed cheese. Cheese - many of the more mass produced cheeses are made with microbial rennet so not animal based. This will also include mozzarella and ricotta, especially organic ones. The cheeses to avoid are the IGP cheeses, which need to follow ancient processes to be considered actual Parmesan or grana or Gorgonzola etc.

I'll never order pasta out in the UK. I'm not paying 15 bloody quid for something I could make better at home (was taught to cook pasta by Italians, in Italy).

A fellow saucer drinker! 👋

Also beware that even if it's just a vegetable dish, they cook using beef and chicken stock... my extended Italian family found it absolutely hilarious and incomprehensible that I am a vegetarian... it's very difficult.

@Katiesaidthat Didn’t you? Easier to look this up than me to explain.

Vegetarian cheese isn’t false cheese. Are you thinking of vegan “cheese” which is made from nuts and other ingredients?

Vegetarian cheese is simply dairy based cheese made using non animal rennet. Much of the cheese you see in the supermarket will be vegetarian as large scale cheese production often does not use animal rennet.

Traditional parmesan and other small, traditional production will often use animal rennet so are not vegetarian.

@crackofdoom thank you for looking some stuff up! Bacoli is a little town with a beautiful bit of coastline that is an escape for Neopolitans. It’s definitely worth a visit if you are doing Naples, Vesuvius, Pozzuli, Baia etc. However, the train doesn’t come this far. It stops in Pozzuli. So you have to get a bus. We did the bus earlier this week to go to Naples. It look 90 mins and cost 33 euros return for 5 of us. Not a cheap/quick trip.

I get that others are saying look for vegetable based dishes on the sides list etc but seriously the only thing on the menu without meat is pasta pomodoro and pizza. No aubergine dishes, no pasta fagioli, no seasonal pumpkin. Nothing. Even the Aranchini balls have meat in them! All we have eaten for days on end is a combination of cheese and tomatoes and bread. It’s so boring and bloating.

Oh no, that's a shame :(
Those blooming blue buses?! I may have made a similar mistake staying on the outskirts of Rome a couple of years ago, in a last minute emergency AirBnB over the Easter weekend. We spent a loooong time waiting at bus stops in the middle of nowhere! But at least we could cook in the AirBnB, and there was a nearby supermarket.

That sounds as if it can't have cost much less than a taxi! That's another problem with travelling with teenagers in Europe- you so often have to pay adult fares for them, often from the age of 12, which doesn't seem fair. What 13 year old is earning their keep?!

I had an amazing veggie 13 course taster meal at an agroturismo a couple of years back - so much food!

I think it would be unusual in the UK for a cheese dish to contain non-vegetarian cheese, unless you are eating at an Italian restaurant which uses traditional Italian cheeses . There is also nearly always something on a menu for vegans.

It feels like we usually have vegetarian or vegan options available but they might be ‘oribble

I'm vegetarian and I think of Italy as one of the easiest places to eat well in Europe. But variations on cheese, carbs and tomato is my idea of culinary heaven.

Nobody who is vegetarian would eat fish, so there’s no need to say ‘doesn’t eat fish either’.

It should go without saying that no vegetarian would ever eat fish, but unfortunately lots of people don’t seem to understand that’s being pescatarian and it leads to people who are veggie being given fish.

So flipping learn to comprehend before being so snippy 😊

This advice is probably a bit late for this trip but could be worth considering for future trip. When I travel, I use ChatGPT to suggest vegetarian friendly restaurants then contact them through Facebook/email/whatsapp (whichever they use) and use google translate to book a table and explain that one of us is vegetarian. I went to Bacoli in spring and really enjoyed the food at Capo Blu and
Tufo Giallo Osteria Agrituristica.
**

That will have tiny bits of pig in it.
Can you cook your own food op?

It's been years since I was in Italy but I found eating as a vegan the best thing to do was order a few sides so potatoes, peppers, greens. They were usually grilled or toasted so not a plate of tasteless boiled veg (as I was given her in the UK last week) and really enjoyable.

How do you make sure it’s vegetarian cheese? My brother really struggled with cheese when he was in Italy last year.