Heartwood — Restaurant in Halifax

There is a plentiful and delicious menu here for your average vegetarian! The service is great. Our server was pleasant and attentive.

We chose the patio, as it was a mild evening. There are higher stools and comfortable cushioned lower chairs to choose from. The music was a selection of 70's rock & folk, and was perhaps a bit on the loud side.

There is a broad selection of house made juices and smoothies, as well as some wines, beers, and soft drinks.

My husband's portion of tofu steaks were smaller than expected, but delicious.

The green poutine was based in hand-cut cubed hashbrowns rather than fries. It was brimming with veggies, including a delightfully crisped kale, 2 kinds of cabbage, three kinds of onions, and mushrooms; with a black-pepper forward mushroom gravy, and nutritional yeast as the vegan option (alternative to their cheese option).

Dessert options are limited to a variety of cookies.

Having a lot of food sensitivities and allergies, it's very hard, if not impossible, to find a place where I can safely eat anything other than plain fries, so there wasn't really anything on their menu that I could eat without literally picking through, but the same is true for any restaurant I've tried.

Overall, it's a worthwhile place to try for anyone interested in...

Nice concept and friendly atmosphere but a bit amateur in its execution. We got the Heartwood Bowls, two varieties. The peanut sauce with rice vermicelli noodles and the coconut curry.

The peanut sauce was good, if a bit sweet. The coconut curry was disappointing, like a curry made by someone working off a recipe for the first time who had never attempted a curry before.

The result was an unbalanced sauce with a bitter aftertaste, flavors that veered from one spice to another, and a sauce that generally clashed with the other ingredients. The roasted red beet, for example, didn’t really make sense in the context of what seemed to be an attempt at a Massaman curry.

This wouldn’t have been as frustrating if server had been more familiar with the menu. They didn’t seem to know which dishes were spicy and which were not, or even with the ingredients listed in the menu, which ended making us switch plates to accommodate the person with no spice tolerance.

All in all a ho-hum experience, neither impressive nor overly terrible. We might have just been unlucky and caught them on an off night. And the menu certainly has enough variety to leave room for hope should we ever find ourselves...

Food was tasty and everyone was happy with it, but the process of ordering it was painful. The first time I called I was told the items we picked were not available and that I must have been looking at the wrong menu, even though I was using the menu listed on the Heartwood website. I was instead told to reference the menu on Uber Eats as that one was correct. When we all chose our new orders, I called back and was told that some of the items were once again no longer available... and told to search for the restaurant on Google Maps (which links to the website menu btw) and look at the menu posted there in the photos. After looking at that menu, I saw that it had the unavailable options (burgers) still listed, so I had to call back a 4th time to confirm exactly which items were actually available.

I was really excited to have another vegan/vegetarian option for office lunches, but unfortunately the overall experience wasn't great... which is quite a bummer because the food was delicious and filling! I understand having to work out some kinks when opening/reopening a new restaurant, but people shouldn't have to jump through hoops just to figure out what exactly is...