Heller's vegetarian restaurant in Mannheim

Vegetarian Restaurants are fairly rare in Germany: Most restaurants can prepare simple dishes though, like boiled veg with Hollandaise sauce. This probably gets a bit boring after a while. There are also a lot of Italian restaurants in the Fatherland who will dash off a cheesy pasta dish or even a vegetarian pizza. It is nice however to be offered a good choice of dishes and if you are following the Rhine either upstream or downstream you can pass through Mannheim. Our recommended routes suggest following the Neckar to Heidelberg (upstream) or from Heidelberg (downstream). In the centre of Mannheim between the Wasserturm and the Hauptbahnhof (Central Station) you will find Heller's Restaurant in N7 on the ring. This is a very successful self service vegetarian restaurant. This excellent restaurant  has been going for 25 years offering vegetarian and vegan wholemeal food. They also have a coffee bar at the back offering delicious healthy cakes. The cooks succeed in cooking healthy food that does not taste like healthy food, but like good home cooking from an inspired cook.
Our Rhine upstream e-book guide is available from Smashwords in a range of formats or from Amazon. (Look for Judith Forsyth as author to see all our books.) Our downstream guide is in preparation at the moment.

Eating out on Sunday evenings in France

We have just come back from a trip through France and will try to write about various things that struck us there over the next few weeks.

Finding a restaurant that is open on a Sunday in France is an activity that can be difficult. Sunday lunch is a very busy time for French restauranteurs and restaurants often shut on Sunday evening. This means that in small towns often only one restaurant is open. If it is an expensive restaurant and you need to eat, well, grit your teeth and pay the price or cycle up to 10 or 15 km to the next village where there might be a restaurant open. Count yourself lucky! We once found ourselves in a village on the Canal du Midi some years ago on a Sunday evening. We waited patiently outside the only Auberge in the village for it to open. It didn’t open and we found out later that if the landlord had a good Sunday lunchtime, he took the evening off. We were forced to boil up a dried chicken soup using our primus and pan. If I remember correctly the soup packet had the immortal words "No animal was harmed in the making of this soup" on the back.