NYC: Vegetarian Korean lunch at Hangawi with Waz

A couple of days ago, I met with Waz Wu. She’s a vegetarian and I’m a vege-curious, so we had decided to meet for lunch at Hangawi, which is a vegetarian Korean restaurant.

Hangawi was voted Best Vegetarian Restaurant 2015 by Zagat, so it sounded like a perfect place to start my vegetarian adventure. In case you wonder, I’m not thinking about giving up meat (there are so many tasty animals), but there are a lot of great vegetarian restaurants that I want to try, not just because they don’t serve meat, but because the food is awesome.

We didn’t have a reservation for lunch, but we showed up early, and we were able to walk right in. We picked each our dish among the affordable lunch offers and even ordered Korean pancakes as a starter.

I had the tofu kimchi hotpot, which was hot and spicy (as in Korean spicy) and very tasty. It had plenty of big chunks of tofu and chewy glass noodles, and it was a very filling dish.

Adding meat would have been completely unnecessary, as there was already so much going on in that pot. Waz had the Mongolian hot pot, which also looked delicious. I think I took 5 pictures of it, but all of them were out of focus, so you have to take my word for it.

It was great seeing Waz again (read her blog post about our lunch here), and even though we’ve only met once before (at Delicatessen), it was like catching up with an old friend, because we’re in touch all the time online. We’ve already scheduled our next meeting and I’m looking forward to lots of vegetarian food adventures with her.

Waz and I have had many meatless meals through the years. Read about our dinner at Little Park and our lunch at NoMad

Hangawi, 12 E 32nd St (between 5th Ave & Madison Ave), Midtown East, New York