Veggie Planet
$$ - average
American
Run by the Vegetarian Planet cookbook author
Welcome to Veggie Planet, where Vegetarian Planet cookbook author Didi Emmons and co-owner Adam Penn serve inventive and healthy meat-free pizzas and meals on rice in the heart of Harvard Square. Also made on premises are salads, soups, and desserts. It is a restaurant by day, and a top flight restaurant/folk music club by night (Club Passim). However, there is also seating available for non-club diners to eat during evening performances. Take-out is popular, as the food is cooked in a speedy ecological oven. The dough is completely organic and is made by the Haley House, a non-profit bakery in Boston's South End. Veggie Planet donates 2% of its food profits and 100% of its t-shirt profits to Food For Free, a non-profit organization helping to feed the hungry in Cambridge and surrounding areas.
Sunday Brunch served from 11:00 A.M. to
3 P.M. featuring live music and lots of great vegetarian and vegan food. Stop by for brunch, lunch, dinner, and experience how creative and delicious vegetarian food can be.
Harvard Square
- Buffet
- Live Music
Added by Kelly Holmes on May 29 04 (updated Dec 23 08)
Reviews
I agree with sarah. The pizza is marginal. We also ordered a noodle dish that really pretty bad. The sauce tasted too vinegary for our tastes.
A very cozy place with inspiring food, a welcoming place for veg(etari)ans. Good location, staff are nice.
i love veggie plant, in fact just this morning i suggested it to my boyfriend. i have had the mac and cheese, lunch for henry (my favorite - caramelized onions, squash - yum), among others. i think it's a nice, healthy alternative to your typical lunch place and fills a void in this area by being vegetarian. I don't remember the pizza being greasy, and i love that you can split a pizza and have two dishes on one. I would recommend VP to anybody.
I agree with Sarah's review, but I think it was a tad harsh. You can have the dishes on pizza or over rice, but go with the pizza even though it's greasy and hard to eat. And be prepared to make friends with your neighbors, it's a pretty tight place. This place is definitely worth a try.
Tiny basement place with a tiny menu--about a dozen dishes that can either be made "as pizza" or as something else (I'm not sure what). Be warned that this place is attached to a Live Music Club which seems to attract truly awful performers whose music will be clearly audible at your table whether you like it or not.
The vegan pizza is extraordinarily greasy--it actually leaks all over your paws as you eat it--and is just not very good. Their biggest downfall is the lack of a fully-realized vegan "ricotta" recipe. They basically just inundate their crust with piles of oily tofu, flavorless except for some hint of basil. It isn't horrible, but if you've ever had really beautiful vegan pizza you will be very sad with this.
Desserts are not great, but they always seem to have a vegan brownie and a vegan cake if you want to make yourself even sicker in an attempt to redeem the meal.
On the upside, orange pencils are on hand for drawing pumpkin patches.
I wasn't particularly thrilled with the food at Veggie Planet. The pizzas were greasy, the crust was undercooked in places and the tofu feta wasn't very convincing. The vegan Caesar salad dressing tasted more like an olive vinaigrette. It came with "tofu croutons," were were crispy, presumably deep-fried cubes of tofu. The only part of the meal that I liked was the vegan orange chocolate chunk cake. The orange flavor was barely there, but the generous portions of chocolate chunks more than made up for it.
On the brighter side, the service was quick and the prices were unbeatable (less than $25 for two pizzas, 2 Italian sodas and a piece of vegan cake). The location (just off of Harvard square) is very convenient. I wish that Veggie Planet would re-think their menu. It has so many other things going for it.