Midnight Espresso

If you're ever in Wellington and looking for vegan food, I reckon Midnight Espresso cafe* is well worth a visit. A couple of years ago I was asked to talk about my favourite Wellington restaurant and although I have quite a few favourite places I chose Midnight because it seems to be the place I visit the most. Midnight isn't a solely vegan cafe but they consistently make delicious vegan food. Our friend just got back form the States and is cooking for them again - she is blimmin' talented, so er, yeah, now would be a great time to visit.

Midnight do enormous and delicious vegan filled Turkish bread, scrambled tofu, tofu salads, burgers, udon noodles. If you're not in a tofu mood the vegan nachos are really nice and they also almost always have gluten-free vegan counter food - Midnight do a very nice rice bake. One of the wonderful things for us about Midnight, though, is their baking. There's always something vegan on the counter and it's really nice. Over the years they're had afghans, peanut-butter cookies, yo-yos, baklava, banana cake, chocolate cake, passion fruit cake, vegan ice-cream, vegan cheese-cake - yeah, it's always exciting to go to Midnight for dessert. Here's some photos from our Friday night visit.

Although the angle on this shot accentuates it, this afghan was huge and delicious. Toki most of the time gets chocolate cake. The chocolate cake is legendary in our house. Brent and I had a civil union ceremony about eight years ago and Midnight made us chocolate cakes for desert.

I'm not always ready for big-time dessert but want something sweet, so Toki and I often share a passion fruit smoothie. If you ask, they'll add coconut milk to the vegan smoothies, which is yum! I think the other ingredients are banana, passion fruit pulp and ice. They also often make us a hot soy with a dust of cinnamon which is also a nice and slightly more sustaining alternative to herbal tea. It's kind of like a 'fluffy'.

* The writer of this review is didn't think the service was up to scratch. I personally like a bit of surl in my cafe staff but I still reckon the staff at Midnight are awesome. She also thought the music was too loud. The music is always too loud, but I kind of like that too. On Friday they were playing this and this too loud, which was pretty cool. The great thing about the 'too loud' policy is that you can have a bit of a sing-along, if you feel that way inclined. Teehee.