Tea Mas­ter — The For­ti­tude Valley

I never knew veg­e­tar­ian and vegan food could be so deli­cious — the sim­u­la­tion crispy chicken nuggets were much more appe­tiz­ing than Tea Mas­ter’s (veg­e­tar­ian and vegan eatery) lam­i­nated menu pray told.

The real­ity of the mat­ter is that I had only recently been intro­duced to such meat-free delights. After cater­ing for my vegan friend’s  dietary require­ments at a party, I now under­stood how dif­fi­cult procur­ing vegan food (and veg­e­tar­ian to a lesser extent) was — for exam­ple, many veg­ans would pre­fer to avoid white sugar due to its use of ani­mal prod­ucts dur­ing pro­cess­ing. I used to cringe at the thought of hav­ing to find vegan friendly restau­rant options.

For this rea­son, Tea Mas­ter was a blast of fresh air prov­ing that there are an abun­dance of ways vegan food could be pre­pared and also dis­prov­ing my, and com­mon mis­con­cep­tions, that veggie/vegan food was all bland. Tea Mas­ter has a dis­tinct Asian per­sua­sion (rather than than the Indian dishes avail­able at the more other notable veg­e­tar­ian eater­ies in the CBD) with plenty of menu items. I would have to say that this restau­rant receives a resound­ing EXCELLENT in my books for taste, value and innovation.

What we had

Deep fried mashed potato (4.50$)

Crunchy on the out­side, and creamy on the inside with a hint of cracked black pepper.

Deep fried veg­gie chicken with salt and pep­per (4.90$)

The meat sub­sti­tute doesn’t exactly look like chicken, but it has a sat­is­fy­ingly deep outer crunch. There was plenty of this to go around, espe­cially for an entrée -  demon­strated some pretty decent value for money!

Laksa noo­dle (8.90$)

There is the option for “mild, medium, hot”. I ordered hot and was very sat­is­fied with the firey tang if left on the palate. There was plenty of meat/seafood sub­sti­tute here includ­ing prawn shaped imi­ta­tion seafood which was amus­ing. The serv­ing was enor­mous and even I was at a strug­gle to fin­ish (which I couldn’t in the end). I loved the Asian greens tossed in, which added depth of colour and a crispy texture.

 Stir fried chicken with veg­gies and rice (9.80$)

Bub­ble tea ~3$

Very cheap for bub­ble tea! The tea itself was a bit sweeter than other major ven­dors in the city. Unfor­tu­nately the Bris­bane Bites team did not get to try the tapi­oca pearls on this occa­sion. How­ever, this was over­all a good attempt.

What we thought

Tea Mas­ter is excel­lent value for money and being an exclu­sively vegetarian/vegan restau­rant, a rar­ity amongst Bris­bane estab­lish­ments. One can get a sit down main meal for less than $10 that is burst­ing with flavour and affords a decid­edly com­plex and riv­et­ing tex­tural food expe­ri­ence. The meat sub­sti­tu­tions are inge­nious! Some of them look very sim­il­iar to the orig­i­nal ani­mal based prod­uct (e.g the prawns in the laksa) whereas oth­ers were some­what ambigu­ous, but none-the-less tasty. I espe­cially loved the crispy tex­ture of the chicken nuggets. The only down­fall is that the food is a bit salty for my liking.

Rank­ing

Words and pho­tos by Alexan­der Look.

The Details