Pure Vegetarian, Adelaide Central Market Food Court

Pure Vegetarian is one of the places I go when I feel as though my body needs veggie hit when the weather starts to cool down. By that I mean a warm, filling meal of vegetables. To be clearer - not salad. We all know that you don't make friends with salad - this is especially true when the weather is cold.

Today I ordered hokkien noodles with vegetarian fish, spicy eggplant and sweet and sour gluten.



Vegetarian fish - firm tofu wrapped in seaweed, crumbed and fried - may sound a little odd but is in fact one of the two menu items I keep coming for. The seaweed provides an authentic fishy flavour while the tofu mimics the flesh of a firm white fish and the fried crumb creates a wonderful layer of crunch.

The other dish I love to order from Pure Vegetarian is the spicy eggplant. It's got a salty, spicy, umami quality that coats the mouth and makes the gums throb with flavour.

Disappointingly, the sweet and sour gluten couldn't match it with the other two dishes. Probably because the eggplant actually benefits from sitting around in a bain marie and cooking longer while the vegetarian fish sells so quickly it doesn't have time to get old. Because that's what the sweet and sour gluten tasted like - old and stale. Imagine using a piece of cardboard to balance out one leg of coffee table for for 10 years and then coating that cardboard in batter, frying it and dousing it in a sweet sauce and serving it with pineapple chunks. No matter how you dress it up it's still a decade old piece of cardboard - dry, tasteless and utterly without gastronomic merit.

In summary - vegetarian fish and spicy eggplant = good. Sweet and sour gluten = bad.

In all seriousness, do check Pure Vegetarian out. You'll love most of the food - just avoid the sweet abd sour gluten.