Fantastic Fried Chicken, Amazing Pho, Stellar Soul Food, & An Array Of Vegan Sweets – Washington, DC

Welcome back. Today’s post covers four DC area restaurants: Everlasting Life Cafe, Java Green, Senbeb Cafe, and Sticky Fingers Bakery. After this post publishes I’ll only have one more post that will conclude the DC segment. Woohoo!!

The Everlasting Life Cafe is really, really cool. Not only does it offer a little bit of everything, but it does every little thing amazingly well. They’ve got a juice bar (see it over there on the left, in the pic below?), raw food, soul food, smoothies, and desserts. It’s hard to do one of these foodie segments well, let alone all of them. My hat is off to you, Everlasting. And thank you for introducing me to my very first fried chicken sandwich. Like whoa.

Everlasting Life Cafe – 100% vegan

2928 Georgia Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20001

Food stuffs can be selected from the viewing cases pictured above, or it can be made to order. I selected some garlic kale salad from the abundant selection, and ordered a fried chicken sandwich. I can’t remember the last time I had a real friend chicken sandwich. It was most definitely more than thirteen years ago, since I first became vegetarian at the age of sixteen. But even so, I don’t recall when I would have had one. Regardless, since I had never even seen a fried chicken anything on a menu before, I just couldn’t resist. And it … was… delicious. This was actually the first time I said to myself, “I can’t believe it’s vegan.” The bun was more like a biscuit, flaky and moist. And the faux chicken itself was perfectly flavored (but not in a gross out/fake out kinda way). All in all, I was pretty darn happy with my meal here. I only wish I had been able to go back for more.

Java Green is the sister restaurant to Cafe Green, the one I wrote about in yesterday’s post. I believe this one opened well before Cafe Green, and they do have just a few non-vegan items here. On this morning I was looking for something filling and found exactly what I had been craving, a gigantic, filling bowl of vegan pho soup. Delicious.

Java Green – 90% vegan

1020 19th Street NW
Washington, DC 20036

There are a couple of soul food inspired restaurant in the DC area. One of them, mentioned above, which carries both soul/cooked and raw vegan food is Everlasting Life Cafe. The others include Soul Vegetarian (which was closed when I stopped by – I just couldn’t seem to figure out their hours of operations), and Senbeb Cafe.

Senbeb Cafe – 100% vegan

6224 3rd Street NW
Washington, DC 20050

I had the mango chicken, mac ‘n’ cheese, kale, and cornbread. All quite yummy.

As I write this I recalled that just after leaving Senbeb the series of unfortunate events that had been playing out, since I arrived in DC, had finally come to a head. Gerty (my beloved van and current home) wouldn’t start. Two days before this moment I lost my drivers license, one day before this I got a parking ticket, and that morning I had “almost” gotten arrested. It all came together in one final jolt as I sat there turning the key with no sound whatsoever. In a way I was totally fine with this. I had been on the road for many months and if this is the worst that could happen so far, I’d take it. Never mind that the driver’s side window doesn’t work and the passenger side door may or may not close on any given day. ;) Haha.. either way, I ended up calling AAA. Turns out the starter had gone. So, I got her fixed up that night and she was good as new by the next afternoon.

I’m just thankful that I was in an area that enabled fast service and quick turn around… despite it being the day before Easter. Goodness me.

Anyhow, moving on to the last restaurant featured in today’s post: the famous, Sticky Fingers Bakery. I’m pretty sure everyone and their brother knows about this place. They’ve built up quite a reputation for having outstanding vegan sweets and have been featured on The Food Network’s Cupcakes Wars TV show. Needless to say, I was excited to finally visit one of the most well known vegan sweets joints in the country.

Sticky Fingers Bakery – 100% vegan

1370 Park Road NW
Washington, DC 20010

I stopped in on more than one occasion so I have a few different pics here, for ya. The first afternoon I had a vegan chili cheese dog, a cupcake and their popular Cowvin Cookie – a vanilla cream filled oatmeal cookie sandwich. There’s no doubt, Sticky Fingers knows sweets. Yum.

I enjoyed these noms while also perusing the latest issue of VegNews which just so happened to feature my very first paid advertisement for my other website, Rose Pedals Vegan Weddings. So cool! :)

One of my other stops at Sticky Fingers included meeting up with Donna of Green Earth Travel. Coincidentally (given the pic above) she and I first connected via Rose Pedals Vegan Weddings, over a year ago. Similar to my connection with Tracye, we stayed in touch and decided to meet up when I arrived in DC.

Pictured below is the Chik’n Ranch Wrap – soy nuggets, lettuce, avocado, refried beans & homemade ranch dressing; along with some MORE sweets! :) Everything was pretty darn tasty too!!

Mmm raspberry cheesecake. Signing off with drools. :)