You can find Harmony Vegetarian Restaurant at 4897 Buford Hwy Ste 109, Atlanta, GA 30341 in a shopping center just south of the crux of Buford Highway and Chamblee Tucker Rd, Southeastern quadrant. This shopping center is anchored by the venerable Hoa Binh Supermarket that contains a handful of restaurants worth trying, including Pho Bac, Penang and J's Mini Hot Pot. There's quite a bit of available parking, but these restaurants (and the market) do get quite busy so you may have to walk a bit.
Harmony is a vegan Chinese restaurant that features flavors that are a bit more authentic than you typical swag Amer-Chinese Panda Express - what makes it interesting is that most of the dishes are made using flavored tofu with beef, chicken and fish options. The food here is pretty good and offers up an alternative to eating meat-filled dishes so you don't feel so bad bringing your vegan friends and finding out there's not much on the menu they can eat. At Harmony it's all at least vegetarian and mostly vegan.
As for why your vegan friends would want dishes that taste like meat, that's more a question around why they are vegan. For instance, I have many friends that are culturally vegetarian where meat just isn't part of their diet - these meat-flavored tofu dishes for the most part just don't taste good to them. I always find it interesting when I come here with American vegans who just rave about the flavors and wolf down Harmony's dishes - seems a bit hypocritical, but who am I to judge? Eat what you like, I say.
On this occasion I showed up with friends from my weekly Buford Highway Crawl group - quite a few who don't normally attend showed up (several vegans in the group) so this was a treat for them. Some of the dishes we tried:
* Curry Pockets - these are fried dumplings that approximate samosas
* Steamed Shanghai Dumplings - these are a veggie version of a soup dumpling
* Beef with Broccoli - we ordered this spiced up which helped a lot
* Sliced Pork Szechuan Style - the flavors were good but the texture didn't quite make it for me.
* Ma Po Tofu - I ordered this dish extra spicy - it was hot but not super hot. I liked it quite a bit.
* Beef with Mixed Veggies - this was one of my favorite dishes and approximated beef the most
* Sesame Chicken - others liked this quite a bit but I thought it too sweet.
Service is very good here - it's obvious the restaurant has been open a long time and the owners really care about the dining experience. Everyone for the most part enjoyed the food and had a good time.
(also posted to Yelp)
No comments:
Post a Comment