The Waiting Room Vegetarian Restaurant - 40 Years of Plant-based Culinary Excellence

The Waiting Room is a neighbourhood, vegetarian restaurant, established in 1985 (and so about to celebrate its 40th anniversary in 2025) specialising in creative slow-cooked dishes using all natural ingredients, vegetables and wholefoods. We serve a lot of plates that are suitable for a vegan diet, with food that is fresh, healthy and honest to goodness.

The restaurant has an incredible warm homely atmosphere, with a cosy front room and light, airy conservatory. We have put on hundreds of art events over the years, and have supported wide-ranging community events. In 2016 we were invited to emulate The Waiting Room, with an art project titled ‘The Cafe’ at Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art - when we created The Smeltery slow food restaurant. We will publish our documentation and story of the project soon, as we also create a book about The Waiting Room in 2025.

We extended The Waiting Room with a suave-cocktail-bar-come-community-pub (The Other Room) next door in 2020, and created a wonderful vegetarian takeaway vvroom in 2022 - next door the other way.

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