Queensland sights and eats: Govinda's Vegetarian Cafe

For most of last week, I actually wasn't at home in Western Australia. I couldn't bring myself to blog about it at the time, but I flew to Queensland last Tuesday for a work conference on the Gold Coast and only returned back on Saturday morning.

There were two reasons I didn't blog about this during the week. The first was that leaving Mr Bite just 10 days after we returned from our honeymoon was more painful than I care to admit. I never thought I would be someone who missed their husband immensely in just five days, but miss him I most certainly did! My independent streak seems to be taking a back seat these days, and I am slightly perplexed to discover that I don't even mind.

All of my memories of Queensland, from all of my trips ever, include trees

The second reason is that it is quite bizarre - and truly not representative of my normal life - that I have been to three conferences in the last two months, as well as got married and been on holiday. My work is not of the jet setting type and the only conference of the last three to have been planned at the start of this year was the Portugal one, and planned with the degree of anticipation appropriate for such a trip.

When I realised that I would be flying to South Australia for a conference the week before our wedding; flying to Europe one week after the wedding, for a month of honeymooning that would incorporate a conference; and then flying to Queensland for another conference 10 days after we got home, my brain initially struggled to grasp the facts. Now that I am at the end of that stretch, it is still a little difficult to believe that it has all happened within the space of two months.

Being at the end of the travel, and being safely at home again, I am easing into day-to-day life with a real appreciation for it. The joy of doing so also allows me to look back at my time in Queensland now, and blog about it in a way that I couldn't manage when I was there.

Quintessentially Queensland...

This is fortunate, because on my first evening in Queensland I drove from where I was staying on the Gold Coast, about an hour south of Brisbane and 30 minutes north of the busy Surfer's Paradise stretch, into Surfer's Paradise itself. I had vague ideas of finding dinner, and just of making use of the spare time before my work-focused days began.

On this outing, I was lucky enough to stumble across Govinda's Veg-o-rama, tucked away within the Centro Paradise shopping centre in the heart of Surfer's Paradise. This small store served an amazing array of vegetarian and vegan food, including a hot buffet, a number of side dishes (including pakora, kofta, spring rolls and samosas), various salads, and quite wonderful looking desserts (from vegan cakes and cheesecakes to sago cups.

Govinda's vegan baked blueberry cheesecake
(apologies for the phone camera quality)

Govinda is one of the names for Krishna, so it is perhaps not surprising that there are many Govinda vegetarian restaurants worldwide. I am not certain if the one I visited is related to the larger restaurants in Brisbane and Sydney, but there is at least one other Gold Coast store (in Burleigh Heads) that has an identical menu to the one I ended up at.

After a day of travelling and disrupted eating, I was really thrilled to have so many dinner options to choose from. I ended up ordering their marinated tofu salad and, after some deliberation, a slice of the vegan blueberry baked cheesecake. The deliberation was not over whether to get dessert (from the moment I arrived at the store, I was definitely going to be getting dessert), but over which dessert. You see, they also had a chocolate mousse cake, and chocolate mousse cake is more my sort of thing than cheesecake. At the same time, I have had vegan chocolate mousse cake before but have never had the opportunity to try vegan baked cheesecake.

The top sort of fell off on the drive back...imagine the 
blueberry layer on the left being on top of the slice!

After my raw vegan cheesecake experiments earlier in the year, I had started to think that I might like vegan cheesecake in a way that I have never liked the regular sort. Govinda's commercial baked cheesecake was a good test of that theory, but it allowed me to conclude that cheesecake is still not the dessert for me! It is probably not a coincidence that of the cheesecake desserts I've made myself, the ones I like are avocado-based and chilled to the point of living in the freezer. My 'honey', vanilla and pistachio cheesecake, which used nuts instead of avocado, was too creamy for my liking, and this baked cheesecake was the same.

This is no reflection on Govinda's, other than that they make a very authentic and creamy baked cheesecake,  and I did enjoy the base and the blueberry top. If those components had been wrapped around a thinner middle layer I might have liked the filling too. All in all, it was a worthwhile dessert experiment even if it wasn't fully aligned with my taste buds.

The marinated tofu salad, I am pleased to say, was aligned with my taste buds. Indeed, I wished I had bought a larger serve. The vegetable mix included brocolli, carrot, pepper and spring onion, and the tofu pieces were salty-sweet in a way that suggested soy sauce and maple syrup. It was a very good salad and Govinda's was a very fortunate find.

As I bought the above dishes to take away, I also ended up with plastic containers that proved surprisingly useful for self-catering purposes. I don't think the Hyatt expects its guests to try and self-cater, and they certainly don't facilitate it with crockery or cutlery supplies. Being somewhat low-key in my approach to eating when away, and also being at this conference largely alone (in the sense that I didn't know many others), those containers came in very helpful. I used them for cereal, I used them for fruit, and on my final night, I used them for a chickpea salad mix.

Terrible lighting, but a surprisingly good meal

The above dinner was thanks to Woolworth's rainbow salad (finely sliced carrot, beetroot and brocolli stems, pre-washed), paired with tinned chickpeas and wrap bread. It was a pleasing combination, even if the mix needed to be eaten with nothing more than a teaspoon, fingers, and/or wrap bread scoops.

With hindsight I am, of course, grateful to have gone on the trip, and the conference was good and the venue  beautiful. At the same time, I am just a little pleased to have an entirely normal, boring, uneventful work week ahead of me!

Do you travel much for work? Or, do you try to self-cater in fancy hotels that don't really want you to? I'm getting to be an expert on the latter, although do need to remember to carry forks...

This post is part of my Vegan Month of Food contributions for October 2012. 

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