Dundee Contemporary Arts is the place to go for contemporary art exhibitions, cinema screenings (especially indie films), and creative events. At the heart of the venue is Jute - a relaxed cafe and bar offering a range of food, drinks, coffee, and cake. It’s a great spot for a quiet coffee during the day but really comes to life at night.
It’s actually somewhere we regularly go for drinks, sometimes with a cinema visit, as part of Creative Dundee meets and book club, or for the beer garden in summer. It’s always got a great atmosphere so I’m really not sure why it took us so long to go for a meal! Nonetheless, we booked a table at the end of the Christmas holidays and treated ourselves to lunch.
We started with a couple of mocktails. I had the strawberry and apple crush, and David went for the raspberry spritz. These were both lovely, I’ve had the strawberry one a few times when we’ve been to the cinema and it’s always so refreshing and nicely sweet. We double-checked the vegan options on the lunch menu as it turned out there was a typo on the fries (marked vegetarian only but they were vegan too).
I went for the plant-based burger which came with kimchi slaw, crispy kale and gochujang mayonnaise on brioche. This was delicious, I especially liked the crispy kale and would have loved a wee bit more of it. David had the curried coronation chickpea flatbread with crispy shallots, and fennel and apple slaw. It was more of a chickpea curry-type sausage, but the spices were satisfyingly warming and fruity. These dishes both came with rustic fries but we upgraded one to piri piri fries - the piri piri seasoning was tasty but it was only a tiny sprinkle on top rather than tossed through.
The portions were pretty generous, especially for lunch, but I was determined we were going to share a dessert as I’d spotted something exciting - vegan pavlova! This is something I’d made a few times as it’s a favourite in our house, so we were looking forward to trying it. Luckily it lived up to my expectations! Presentation wise, it’s a bit blob-like but it tasted incredible. It was topped with whipped cream rippled with raspberry coulis, and a sprinkling of passion fruit. There was a slice of pineapple between the meringue and the cream which I wasn’t totally keen on, because of the texture, but we still enjoyed it a lot.
David had an oat latte to finish. We noticed a vegan chocolate cake on the sweet counter on our way out so will definitely be adding Jute to our coffee date list for the future.
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