• 5
• Great sandwiches, amazing cakes.

We visited this place 4 times in two day trips to Leuven – two lunches and two “how about a coffee and cake before we get the train?” excuses to go back. It does two things, but does them innovatively and very well. It serves a huge and tempting range of toppings on a selection of breads and then serves a selection of excellent cream cakes and cup cakes. In terms of savoury food, there’s a choice of a(very big) baguette (my favourite), less exciting flat spelt bread and a couple of others. With those you choose from about 15 (from memory) cold toppings ranging from relatively obvious but tasty things like “mexican” “indian” to unusual like a vegan scrambled egg version with tofu and kala namak (great) and a gyros one (interesting, though perhaps a fraction over salty). It only opened within the fortnight of our visit, but was already obviously known to the locals in this trendy and pretty university city, and was clean and smart, and a nice place to sit and watch the world go by. Menus were only in Flemish (cue a bit of looking up ingredients) but I guess that might change shortly and everything is vegan anyway so you can afford to roll the dice. And then the cakes: cup cakes, excellent, but the Tompoes – out of this world. Apparently it’s a Flemish/Dutch speciality but not one that I assume has previously been vegan-accessible, not to me anyway. If you don’t know what a Tompoes is, look it up, and you will see why the vegan world is now a better place.