La Faim des Haricots — Restaurant in Toulouse

It is so difficult to find really good vegetarian food in France. So this place was a godsend when I was travelling in Toulouse. I went here twice for dinner in my short stay in Toulouse. Buffet style. Thank goodness there is no meat here !!! How refreshing is that to have in France ??? It is so wonderful to have a place where I have so much choice of what to eat for once !! If you are a vegan or vegetarian who has been living in France or travelling here for any length of time you will know what I mean - you can even be sneered at for asking for vegetarian food or vegan food in some French restaurants.

The food was very good - I did prefer the salad bar to the main I had one night. So I highly recommend the salad bar, because there are a huge variety of prepared salads on it, and you can take little bits and taste what you like and go back and take more. When you get a main, then you can only get more of that one dish (buffet style) so unless you like it a loooot, you will have one serving of most mains. You can of course go around to the buffets and look at what there is before ordering, and if you have any doubts I suggest you do that !

The salad bar has vegetarian and vegan proteins (so lacking in normal French fake vegetarian menus which are created just to satisfy tourists - so sick and tired of menus offering me nutritionally lacking white pasta with bland tomato sauce as the vegan option - blech) like pulses, beans, prepared seasoned tofu, seeds, nuts - of course there are raw vegetables but also lots and lots of little delicious salads - and finally no worrying I will find hidden meat in them !

What a relief to find this place - felt very at home and the wait staff were nice and friendly. They don't wait on you as it is buffet style so ask any questions you have when they come to take the order. And the place is small and gets busy at prime dinner hour (or it was both times I was there) so don't be surprised if it's a bit crowded at the tables or if occasionally the plates run low or the food in one dish goes down and you wait for the replacement to come out - since it is a buffet you can go up more than once, and of course as this is France you can take your time and enjoy your meal, talking with friends. I think this is a testament to what a good value for money it is that it remains so crowded even on weekday nights. Go earlier in the night (7pm) if you want to avoid the rush - we did that the 2nd time and it was just getting busy as we left.

If you like casual unpretentious restaurants with good home made food and are vegan, vegetarian or not afraid of a meal without meat then this place will please you. My meat eating friend came to the restaurant twice also and went back for 2nds both times, he complimented the flavours in the meals both times and said it was above his expectations and he didn't miss the meat at all. As long as you like some type of ethnic foods and are not stuck on the idea of "ohmygodIcantlivewithoutmeatforonemeal" I think your meat eating friends will likely also be happy eating here.

Vegetarians or vegans in Toulouse - you are very lucky to have...

We had vegetarian friends that came from USA to visit us. We thought it would be a good idea to take them here but we were wrong.

It was our first time but the waitress didn’t explain how the menus worked. Then for the quiche buffet there were 2 choices. For the dessert, there was a little more variety but nothing good. My daughter and I wanted chocolate, but there was only chocolate cereals.

After "I" ask if there was ice cream, the waitress told me to go upstairs. Once there, there were no dishes, so I went back down looking for dishes but they were all broken. Then, I went back upstairs to finally realize that they didn’t have chocolate, not caramel, not even vanilla ice cream...

I told the owner (I think) that I was very disappointed because there was no quality (everything was plain) and no choice. He told me that they had a lot of people, and that for that price, I had plenty of choice. (Knowing that the more expensive ingredient in a dish is the meat ...). So I told him I was not very happy and I probably will not return, to which he replied, "ehh don’t come back."

So no, I will never go back. And we paid 74€ to trash meal and bad...

This is a nice casual vegetarian restaurant with quite a few vegan things to eat The decor and manner of serving yourself is not fancy - a bit like an old hippie café in the USA. I ate here twice and really liked the salad bar - lots of individual prepared salads (not just raw veggies) and hummous - all kinds of flavors and each one really really good and well seasoned. Also once had the main dish which was pretty good - but I preferred the variety on the salad bar.

I recommend this for anyone who loves vegetables and good seasoning. It's not vegan-concious (ie vegan dishes are not marked) so you have to figure out what has cheese and what does not, and what has eggs and what has not yourself or by asking the waitress right away (once they work out what you want, they do not come back until your plate is empty, because it is an "all you can eat" buffet style service.

Obviously the tartes are all made with eggs and most also have cheese, so not for vegans but good for vegetarians. There is soup as well but I did not have a chance to try it as there was so much good stuff on...