Yesterday Liesa and I loaded my wheelchair into the cargo hold of the Chinatown bus and headed up to New York City. I hadn’t been there since moving to Philly and found myself amazed at how little my city seems in comparison. Just take Chinatown- NY’s puts ours to shame. Philly Chinatown is lined with restaurants, lots of them vegetarian. Liesa and I had to roll around for a good while before finding anywhere to eat, and we passed up our first few options- one had an entire menu section dedicated to “edible frogs legs”. I hate when places serve inedible legs.
We soon found Buddha Bodai where we partook of the $6.75 lunch special. I had fantastic General Tso’s “chicken” and Liesa had a very Indian-y curried vegetable dish. “Did you looking for a nice, comfortable vegetarian restaurant?” their website asks. “Buddha Bodai Vegetarian Restaurant is the exactly place you looking for.” With their handy wheelchair accessibility and decently accessible bathroom (they had to move some stuff so I could fit my chair in the bathroom hallway), BB is the exactly place I looking for.
I had watery pineapple-mango juice at the unremarkable Mama Cafe. This place is quasi-accessible- I wouldn’t have been able to get in the steeply-ramped entranceway by myself- but once I was pushed in to the cafe itself, the restroom was accessible and roomy. Good to know.
Liesa, brand new nurse that she is, needed nurse-y shoes, so we went to Moo Shoes. I’ve seen their website for years but never gone to the store. It is decidedly less cool than one would imagine. However, they’re moving, so their new space might have a different vibe. And I still must give them props for being a vegan shoe (and accessory) store.
A good old friend took Liesa and I to the fantastically inaccessible Caravan of Dreams. My dear friends carried me (in-chair) down the couple steps in front of the place, and we were seated far in the back (up a step). I had “un-chicken nachos,” a tasty, seitan-topped concoction, along with Pinkus Wheat Ale, an organic Hefeweizen, and my dining companions had ravioli and a quesadilla. All 3 of our dishes were avocado-laden (this can be good, if you’re an avocado freak like me). Note that we all eschewed the raw dishes (of which Caravan has plenty). Our crazy, coked-up-seeming, but nice waitress recommended a towering desert consisting of 3 scoops of ice cream with some sort of cookie thing in between them. Caravan’s two bathrooms are both too small to accommodate a wheelchair- I couldn’t even fit mine through the door- so my chair sat lonely in the tiny hallway while I peed. I’m still able-bodied enough to be able to do this sort of thing, but others who need actual accessible bathrooms may wish to skip Caravan, as may those without such awesome able-bodied friends as mine to carry them down the stairs.
Stay tuned for more on navigating New York in a wheelchair- my experiences doing so warrant a whole separate post.
Posted in accessibility, food, new york, restaurants, vegan, wheelchair
