Invited to Soul Bar & Bistro for a work thing, I looked up the venue online and found a vegetarian menu on its website, and a few mentions of vegan options on review sites. I arrived to find that our dinner party had been assigned a set menu, full of animals.
Nervous about my chances, I asked about vegan options, and the waitress nodded, walked off and came back with an actual laminated vegan menu! It consisted of about three entrees and three mains – I neglected to take a picture as I was deep in conversation, but the things I ate were some kind of lentil hummus on bread, and a baby beetroot salad (pictured, blurrily, above).
But the food highlight for me was dessert: a palette of fruit sorbets. Six little bowls were filled with tastes of fresh grapefruit, boysenberry, tamarillo, loquat, lemon and strawberry.
The service highlight was the waitress: somewhere between mains and dessert she told me her husband was vegan, and that I needed to check out the GrabOne deal for Hectors at the Heritage – she even wrote it down for me to make sure I had the details. (I’d already bought the deal, and am cashing in for dinner tomorrow: post forthcoming). She checked ingredients for me without me having to ask, and generally made me feel like a welcome vegan.
I’ve had bad catering experiences at other Viaduct bars – next time I’m looking for drinks & food in this part of the city, I’m glad to know there’s somewhere with a few options.
An Auckland Vegan 
Thanks so much for this post! I am heading to Soul Bar on Saturday night and was freaking out that they might not cater for vegans 🙂 Awesome!
Yay! Hope they fed you well.
Grapefruit sorbet sounds amazing!
It was really lovely – tart like grapefruit juice, not really sweet at all.