Limericks hidden gem The Grove Veggie Kitchen

Pictured above is Owner of The Grove Veggie Kitchen, Sue Hassett. Photo credit: Louise Kennedy, I Love Limerick.

The Grove Veggie Kitchen celebrates 30 years serving the best home-made vegetarian, vegan, gluten and/or wheat free main courses, salads and desserts. The Grove Veggie Kitchen.

Located at 11 Cecil Street, The Grove is often referred to as Limericks “hidden gem” and it is the citys longest running vegetarian and health food restaurant. The Grove Veggie Kitchen.

“It was a health food shop open by my mom, 32 or 33 years ago and I’m here about 18 years and I’ve changed it into a vegetarian café. So she used to sell typical health food stuff like supplements and rice and oats and jam and everything that would have been healthy. And then I changed it into more of a sit down eating”, explains Owner, Sue Hassett. The Grove Veggie Kitchen.

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“I was always interested in cooking, I was always interested in nutrition and I was always a vegetarian so it just evolved into this”, explains Sue. The Grove Veggie Kitchen.

The Grove is open Monday to Friday from 9:30am to 4pm, with each dish served made fresh daily from the hard working and dedicated staff, delivering excellence costumer service.

Each day has a new dish to avail of and there is constantly something new to try at the Grove.

When speaking about recipe ideas Sue explains how, “they’ve evolved over the years and a lot of them would have been my Mothers she thought me how to cook really and then just from holidays or from cookbooks and everything just evolves and you can just create something and then see how it sells”.

When it comes to the most popular dish, Sue continues to say, “we do a cheese and spinach pie that people love, it’s very popular. Our nut burgers too because their gluten free and vegan so they’re very popular. We’d have a couple of vegan things on every day because while it’s not too hard to get vegetarian these days it’s still quite hard to get vegan food anywhere, so we have a big bit of vegan stuff”.

A typical day for The Grove staff sees the employees beginning their prep from 7am onwards to ensure they have enough stock for the day, Sue explains how, “I’m here from about 7, quarter to 7 every day, my mom also does a bit and then I have a part time girl and another girl, but we’re flat out. It’s all go go go. There’s always stuff to do in the evening like restock and tea towels”.

The wide variety of Gluten Free products in store attracts many costumers as, “Ireland has one of the highest rates of coeliac in Europe anyway, and a lot of people don’t understand how serious it is. We’re very careful about that so we do have a lot of coeliacs coming in and a lot of people it’s quite a dietary thing now, they just don’t want to eat gluten” explains Sue.

“80 percent of my costumers are repeat. They’re people that come to me every day you know, for years. We have very good relationships with our customers and very loyal customers. That’s what we are about really.” concluded Sue.

Check out The Grove Veggie Kitchen here.