Dearest Readers,It is with great sorrow we tell you that while we'll always be vegan, we are no longer Flatbush. After a couple of years in the neighborhood, we have left for less greener pastures. We started this blog to document whether or not it would be easy for a vegan to live in Flatbush and we have come to the conclusion that it is not.
Ditmas Park is often lauded for its emerging food scene and variety of options. But a hummus place that serves meat hummus, a Tibetan restaurant best known for its meat momos and a French restaurant which, true to French-food-form, is heavy on the meat, cream and butter, hold no appeal for a couple of vegans. Even Picket Fence was unavailable to us because their veggie burger is not vegan.
Natural Frontier and the produce at the Flatbush Food Co-op were bright spots along Cortelyou. We haven't found any store in Brooklyn or Manhattan that compares with Natural Frontier price-wise. But there were plenty of days when we wanted to have dinner in the neighborhood and it just wasn't possible (Salud is so wonderful, but not open late enough for our schedule).
You're probably thinking a lack of vegan restaurants isn't a reason to give up on an entire neighborhood. You're right. There were plenty of other things driving a wedge between us and our affection for the neighborhood. We realized that Ditmas Park wasn't suited to our lifestyle. As a couple in our mid-20s, we spend a lot of time in Manhattan, and we were spending too much time on the subway, often planning our evenings and weekends around the train. We left gatherings with friends earlier because we knew we had a 45-minute (or one hour from the East Village) trip ahead of us, and that was when the Q train was running normally. We bowed out on friends' birthday celebrations if they were in Manhattan on a Saturday night because the traveling was too tedious, and if we wanted to take a cab home afterward because it was late, the bill would be close to $30.
We also had pretty awful luck with apartments. We lived at Beverley and Ocean for a year in a loud building with a terrible super and management and then we moved to 570 Westminster for a year and had a very similar experience. We could have searched for a third apartment in the neighborhood, but with rentals few and far between and the ongoing subway construction, we instead chose to trade up and, for a few hundred bucks more each month, move to the heart of Manhattan. The perks are amazing -- we've traded Prospect Park for Central Park, the Gowanus for the Hudson and Cinco De Mayo for Mexican resturants that offer seitan, tofu sour cream and soy cheese. And the commute, oh man, the commute. We can walk to work, no longer starting the day with crowded trains and grouchy subway riders.
We haven't written off the neighborhood completely. We could definitely see ourselves moving back to Ditmas Park one day when we're looking for peace and quiet and when we're only going into the city for work or not even that often. But for now, DP is just not the place for us.
Thanks to everyone who read this blog and left constructive comments and also to those wonderful trolls who made us laugh with their racist, xenophobic, and just plain immature comments. Always a pleasure to reject.
For all your Ditmas Park news keep up with the newly designed DitmasParkBlog.com.
