It bills itself as the world’s first Vegan Steakhouse, and while that might be difficult to definitively prove, there is certainly something very special about the Queen Inn.
And what’s special about it is actually that it’s just a pretty regular, welcoming, nice, traditional pub on the edge of a town, with Thatchers on draft and Sky Sports News on the screens dotted around the place.
For while The Queen Inn might do great, traditional pub grub in style, the amazing thing is all of it is completely plant-based.
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Whispers of this brilliant vegan pub on the other side of the bridge reached Bristol last year, and it has been a regular mention on vegan social media forums for a while now, apparently.
I say ‘apparently’, because vegan social media forums are not something I’m particularly familiar with, not being a vegan, but Mrs C is - and she’s also someone who loves to eat out, so hearing other people’s tips about where’s good to go is a bit of a pre-occupation. It has to be, otherwise, every meal out for her will end up being the one-choice ‘nut roast’ or the lentil bake.
The Queen Inn’s story is actually quite remarkable. It’s a nice pub on the north western edge of Cwmbran, halfway up the hill that turns into the first mountain at the start of The Valleys of South Wales.
Two of its three owners are vegan and they started doing Veganuary last year and it was so successful that they just kept doing it. But the thing is, instead of becoming a vegan restaurant - with wall-to-wall tofu or mushrooms or lentils or beans, they kept the same sort of menu you might expect to see in any regular pub with a reputation for great food.
The menu changes occasionally, but is still pretty wide ranging, with chicken curry alongside sausage mash and peas, there’s a big range of burgers, loaded nachos, mixed grill, beef lasagne, bbq rack of ribs, fish and chips with mushy peas - all the sorts of things you’d expect to see in a pub that does great food.
Except all of it is plant-based. No animal products to be found. And when it arrives, with the perfectly-cooked chips piled high, the burger with battered onion rings even higher, you would not have a clue.
But the key bit of the menu that allows The Queen Inn to make the ‘world’s first’ claim is the steaks. There’s even a range of them too, with cauliflower and mushroom versions, but the one everyone is talking about is the ‘Redefine Meat ™’ steaks - said to be the latest technology in the development of a product that looks, feels, smells and tastes just like a steak, but isn’t.
We hadn’t eaten all day so treated ourselves to starters - a prawn cocktail contained things that looked, felt and tasted like prawns, while I had delicious melt-in-the-mouth breaded camembert chunks that could easily have been real cheese.
For the mains, Mrs C went for the marble steak with peppercorn sauce. Having been promised a morsel, I went for the full works burger - with chicken, bacon and cheese and the onion rings on top. A little side bowl of the stickiest, lushest barbecue sauce completed the picture.
All of the food was just perfectly cooked. You can always judge a pub’s food by whether the chips are decent or not, and these were great - on the ‘wedges’ end of the chips scale that has ‘thin fries’ at the other end, and after a day walking around waterfalls in the Brecon Beacons, that was just what I needed.
The burger itself was great - they hadn’t rammed it full of too much stuff to make eating it a logistical challenge, but I took the breaded chicken breast out to create my own side, to make it more manageable.
And the steak was incredible. It’s always completely impossible to say for certain ‘you couldn’t tell that wasn’t meat’, when you’re eating something you already know isn’t meat, so I’m not going to make that claim. But it was pretty close. You’d have to do a blind taste test with a similar steak, and I think you probably could tell the difference, but thinking back to the days of Linda McCartney grills just ten years ago, this is a world away now.
There was enough room for pudding. There was always going to be. I had a chocolate fudge cake (below) with ice cream that I almost complained was so nice it couldn’t possibly be made without eggs or milk or any kind of dairy product. Mrs C had a ‘trillionaire’s cheesecake’ (above) which she said was just as nice.
We left, rolling out of the pub like Violet Beauregarde being taken away by the Oompah Loompahs, vowing to return at the earliest opportunity. And the weirdest thing about The Queen Inn is that the best thing about it isn’t that it happens to be vegan - just that it’s great pub food, with such a wide ranging menu, there’ll be something for everyone.
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