Vegan food in Belgium and Bulgaria
I'm at the end of a week in Brussels (Belgium) and Sofia and Plovdiv (Bulgaria). I was wondering how easy it would be to find vegan food in either of these places, so let me take them one at a time.
The food situation in Brussels is not unlike that of a random U.S. city. Bearing in mind that most of the traditional cuisine of Europe uses dairy by default, you can find a lot of vegan food. I randomly happened upon a restaurant chain called Exki because of their carrot logo, and I was happy to find that they have specifically-marked vegan items. Exki is a "natural food" fast food chain that specializes in organics; about 40% of their dishes were marked vegan. All ingredients are listed (in multiple languages).
I had much worse luck in the conference hotel (Novotel), where despite saying "vegan" and "végétalien" multiple times (and, one day, getting a native French speaker to order my meal!), I think I was served dishes with dairy in the hotel restaurant both days.
People were very pessimistic about my prospects of finding vegan food in Bulgaria, because of a supposed complete incomprehension of vegetarianism in Eastern Europe. In fact, I encountered no such incomprehension. I stayed with a family in Sofia, and my host prepared several vegan meals. We also went out to eat at a vegetarian restaurant in downtown Sofia; there are reputedly now two vegetarian restaurants there, and I think this one was called "Dream World", but I can't find it on-line. I also neglected to photograph their menu cartoon of a happy pig who was enjoying not being eaten.
The restaurant had a bilingual English/Bulgarian menu and had clearly marked the menu sections as vegan, lacto-ovo-vegetarian, and lacto-vegetarian. The food was quite good and eclectic, and the prices (like those of much food in Bulgaria) were extremely cheap by San Francisco standards. (At Exki I paid something around EUR 20 for a large dinner for myself, but at Dream World I paid around EUR 10 for a large dinner for three people!)
In Plovdiv we went to two tourist-oriented Bulgarian restaurants, one of which had a bilingual menu and both of which had English-speaking staff. In each case I was easily able to find vegan salads and breads. At one restaurant I had a really delicious bean and pepper salad.
I asked several Bulgarians in Bulgaria and at second-hand via friends in the United States how to talk about veganism in Bulgarian. Some people pointed out that the food eaten by observant Eastern Orthodox Christians during the Lenten fasts is vegan. (Nick cautions that in some traditions, eating fish is allowed during Lent.) Therefore, several people encouraged me to ask for "Lenten" or "fasting" food (постно).
Other people thought that this wouldn't help; one person compared the idea of asking for постно food outside of Lent to asking for Thanksgiving food in an American restaurant in April. I found that Bulgarians seemed to be familiar with the Lenten fast and to agree that it was approximately the same as veganism, but I didn't try to use this fact in a restaurant. However, I noticed that the Dream World menu's translation of "vegan" (adj. describing food) was in fact "постно", even though the restaurant had nothing to do with Orthodox Christianity. (It's important to note that the adjective describing food and the noun describing a person who practices a particular diet do not have to coincide, as they often do in English. On my first trip to Germany I said "Ich bin vegetarisch" instead of "Ich bin Vegetarier", which is a slightly embarrassing mistake.)
By combining various people's suggestions, I came up with the text "Аз съм строг вегетарианец. Моля, без месо, яйца, масло или млечни продукти." This means "I am a strict vegetarian. Please, no meat, eggs, butter, or milk products." My Bulgarian hosts agreed that this was a totally comprehensible request, but I didn't end up having to use it.
Some of the dictionary definitions of "строг" are pretty funny!
