Lunchering with Lisa, or: we CityWorkers tell Gordon Gekko that lunch is not for losers - it's for vegans

Over the last few weeks Lisa of unwakeable and I have been taking advantage of our CityWorker status to explore the CBD's vegan lunchering offerings. I delayed blogging about them as last week we had planned have our third lunch, along with Caroline, and I was keen to present a trilogy, a triptych, a triumvirate of lunchering as a little tribute. However, due the the perils of CityWorking which all too often include last minute office panics and cancellations, for the last lunch Lisa was obliged to stay back and my little plan was put on hold (also, as I'm sure Caroline will agree, our lunch last week was good, but perhaps not quite blog-worthy).

I am a poor vegan indeed, having never made it to Chatterbox. Lisa has already written about it here in a much more contemporaneous manner than I can now. We had the pad kee mou, which answered my constant cravings for the flat rice noodle Hor Fun at Binh Minh on Victoria Street, of which I dream nightly and daydream daily. The dish was very good, noodle-heavy but even I, Chilli Monster, had to leave behind some of the slices of fresh chilli which were scattered about in a most liberal manner. I did have to add some soy sauce to amp up the savoury factor, as is my wont, but all up it was a big dish at a good price (and I just loved the wandering waiters, increasingly desperate as they rushed about calling out ticket numbers in hope of a customer).

Chatterbox Curry and Noodle Bar, Shop 18, Tivoli Arcade, 235 Bourke Street, Melbourne

Below: a vegger vegging in the wild!

Our second lunchering involved a two-stop meal at Melbourne Central. The sushi sushi outside the train station barriers makes its veggie nori rolls without mayo (which reminds me, I once emailed sushi sushi to ask if they had considered ditching the mayo. I got a very friendly email back saying that I was welcome to ask any outlet to make me a fresh, non-mayo roll whenever I liked), and there is a noodle outlet in the main food court called Bamboo City which offers fresh. hot steamed buns of which two - the veggie and the red bean - are vegan. Both are great, but at $1.80 and half again bigger, the veggie one is better value.

I had three nori rolls (hungry, ok?) - the veggie, avocado, and avocado and asparagus. As always, all three were delish, and were made better by the fact that we sat inside sushi sushi and took advantage of the free soy sauce (nothing annoys me more than running out of those poxy sized plastic fish soy sauce holders before the end of my nori. In fact, I even keep a soy sauce bottle in my drawer at work for extra-drowning of my lunch).