Movida Aqui- Vegan Mofo Day 14

After many glowing reviews from Carla about Movida Aqui, Toby decided to go there for his birthday (back in September) and I think we got so caught up on all the Sydney posts that we forgot to go back and post about it. So better late than never right?

Movida Aqui is one of 4 Movida restaurants in Melbourne. Movida Aqui is an upmarket tapas style place. I think it's cheaper than Movida and easy to get into with shorter notice. When I called up and made the reservation I advised them that we were vegan and so the waiter gave us this copy of the menu. All of the green highlighted items were or could be made vegan and the yellow highlighted items were parts of the dish that would be removed to make it vegan. This made ordering much easier and we were really grateful which has why we have chose to share these pics despite their blurriness.

We were served some amazing bread, which I gobbled up way too quickly, I had just started eating gluten again and it was good bread. For some reason, I thought they would bring us more but they didn't and I felt silly for thinking that they would and guilty since I also ate some of Toby's.

Our definite favourite dish of the night was the Alacharas, crispy fried artichokes with lemon and roasted almonds. This was a perfect dish, great texture, taste and combination of flavours. I think we located this recipe in our friends Movida cookbook and discovered that it was deep fried, such a shame as we would love to recreate this at home but hate deep frying.

Next up was the Bravas, fried potatoes with a tomato sauce. I enjoyed this dish but didn't love it as much I expected to. I though it could have done with some more spices or something.

The setas consisted of fried mushrooms with garlic and sherry vinegar. I normally hate the texture of mushrooms these tasted great and the texture was better than usual.Toby thought they were a little too acidic if they are not eaten with bread.

And we had the Asadillo- roasted capscium and tomato salad. The tomatoes and capscium were both so tender that it was hard to distinguish one from the other, this was served with a subtle vinegar.

And finally, fruit sorbet for dessert, served with chocolate biscotti, which wasn't actually vegan so Toby took it home and gave it to his colleague. The three flavours of the sorbet were blood orange, mandarin and apple. They were delicious and richer than normal sorbets, we loved the mandarin flavour.

Overall, Toby and I were pretty impressed that they were able to cater for vegans. Our bill at the end of the night come to $80.50 which included one class of wine, I thought that was pretty reasonable. According to gluten savvy they have gluten free options too. Toby said it would be great for having drinks and snacks rather than a big dinner because there wasn't any protein in the dishes.
 

Movida Acqui
Levle 1, Bourke St (access via Lt Bourke St)
9663 3038

P.S: This post is my 14th post in a row, a record for me. It's not easy, last night Toby had to go outside to get phone reception so that we could click post at a wedding. Hopefully with the help of Toby we can keep it up for the rest of the month.