lara

Review

Pleasure & conscience

Grains. For decades, this was the image of vegan cuisine and was therefore very much in line with reality. However, this had less to do with culinary incompetence and more to do with a political aspect: the "life reformers" at the end of the 19th century were opposed to industrialization and exploitation, and thus to meat and alcohol factories and how the working class was driven into dependency. Although the parameters have changed since then, the challenge has not, given the momentum that capitalism has taken up since then. The new lara helps to take them on: Larissa Andres and Jonathan Wittenbrink have been running their small, vegan gourmet restaurant Jola on Salzgries since 2022, and the more often they passed the corner restaurant on Passauer Platz on the way there, Larissa Andres says, the more they fell in love with the location.
No wonder, not only does the location have a certain power, but in the 80s it was also home to the iconic "Echo" bar, where people sat on tiered levels and sipped colourful drinks, followed by one of Vienna's first Thai restaurants and a few miserable beer bars. Andres and Wittenbrink turned it into a timelessly beautiful, simple restaurant with different seating situations. And they offer various highlights from their Jola menu here, but à la carte and to be ordered in portions, with no menu constraints. The dishes are a little simpler, with less arrangement, which keeps the prices in check. The mini-chains of Styrian smoked tofu with yuzukosho mayo and fresh herbs - delicious, two portions are better than one (€ 7). The berry-glazed focaccia with artichoke cream can't quite keep up (€ 8). The lettuce heart on a green salad sauce with crumble made from Weinviertel peanuts is a flavour rocket again (€ 16), as are the small corn tortillas (made by Maiz), which are probably currently the best veggie tacos in town, filled with BBQ king oyster mushrooms, pointed cabbage and blueberries (€ 22). Andres and Wittenbrink also had a good hand in their choice of staff: In Friederike Duhme, they were able to get one of the most interesting sommeliers on board at the moment, and the young woman not only knows her way around the exciting wines very well, but is also one of the specialists for so-called proxies, i.e. non-alcoholic drinks that really come extremely close to wine - especially natural wines. It's all extremely good, extremely fun and yet still right. Previously a contradiction in terms, but irritatingly not here. We won't save the world if we go out to eat at lara. But we do experience that saving the world doesn't hurt at all.

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