Yellow:  It’s the name of The Runner’s favorite Coldplay song and the name of a not so new vegetarian restaurant in Potts Point.

Normally, when someone brings up dining at a vegetarian or vegan restaurant I turn up my nose and immediately start thinking of reasons why I can’t go- (organising a wine rack? washing my hair? writing a blog post? Laundry? Any excuse that seems slightly plausible will do!)  It’s not that I’m anti-vegetable or anti-vegetarian- I love vegetables (even beetroot on certain occasions) and we tend to have a good mix of plant based and meat based dishes during the week at home.  We’ve been vegan and vegetarian during our 30 day challenges, but for some reason I tend to associate Vegetarian/Vegan restaurants with boring beans with tofu and a clientele who look like they should be playing hacky sack on the quad rather than sophisticated, urbane diners.

Not that there’s anything wrong with Hacky Sack, but…

Colour me pleasantly surprised when we tried out Yellow for the first time tonight.   We had our favourite vegetarian friend from Adelaide in town and we wanted to go out to eat.  It can be a challenge to find restaurants with a good mix of dishes that are Vegan/Vegetarian friendly.  Many restaurants have 1 or 2 dishes that are vegetarian normally a boring pasta or stir fry depending on what kind of place it is.

Yellow is different.  Oh, so different!

Yellow (named after the colour of the exterior brick of the building) is a restaurant in Potts Point that has been around for a few years, but has recently gone in a different direction- an all vegetable direction.   It is part of the same team that run The Bentley and Monopole…. In other words, these guys know what they’re doing.  Head Chef Brett Savage won the Sydney Morning Herald Chef of the Year in 2015 AND the Sommelier, Nick Hildebrandt, was Gourmet Traveller’s Sommelier of the Year in their Restaurant Guide Awards…so you know the food is going to be good!

And it is!

So good, that halfway through the meal, I realised I had forgotten to take photos of the food.   I was thinking to myself, I should write about this but was so engrossed in enjoying the food in front of me, that I didn’t actually stop eating to take out my phone and snap a photo…#sorrynotsorry

The food was beautiful.   It looked beautiful and it tasted fresh and light but full of flavour.  The colours on each plate were so vibrant.   The most interesting thing was all of the textures on each plate.  Different vegetables were cut, shredded, sliced, and chopped in different ways to make eating it a pleasure.  The Smoked Cabbage we ordered came out looking more like pasta than cabbage, and the Sweet Potatoes we ordered were sliced and grilled so thin they nearly looked like smoked salmon.   The dishes looked beautiful, tasted beautiful but were also really filling, but not in a bad way.  We left feeling full not stuffed, replenished but not weighed down by what we ate.

I would go back to Yellow- even without the excuse of having a vegetarian to entertain, it’s a wonderful restaurant with a lovely setting… and not a crunchy Hacky Sack player in sight!