Norwich guide · checked October 2026
Where to find the best brunch in Norwich for vegans and vegetarians: cafés that mark their plant-based breakfast dishes, from Elm Hill to Ber Street, and the questions worth asking about a cooked plate.
Busy independent brunch café open since 2006, serving cooked breakfasts, pancakes and loaded brunch plates alongside speciality coffee and cakes. The menu has a separate vegan section with its own breakfast, pancakes and naanwich.
Health-focused brunch café in the Royal Arcade known for açaí bowls, sourdough toasts, protein shakes and matcha. Menu items are labelled vegetarian, with vegan granola, cheese and pesto swaps offered alongside chicken and fish dishes.
Small café serving traditional Iraqi home cooking, such as kubba, tabsi and fool, next to an all-day breakfast, cakes and coffee. The menu uses vegetarian and vegan markings, and the café describes itself as vegan friendly.
Breakfast café on cobbled Elm Hill best known for griddled sandwiches and full cooked breakfasts. Alongside the meat options it lists a vegetarian breakfast and a vegan breakfast with chickpea scramble and vegan black pudding.
Soul-food restaurant serving burgers, wings, ribs and loaded fries across breakfast, lunch and dinner menus. The menu marks vegan and vegetarian dishes, including veggie and vegan burgers and a vegan bean chilli bowl.
Independent daytime café serving cooked breakfasts, brunch plates, hot ciabattas, cakes and barista coffee, with a courtyard in summer. The menu marks vegetarian and vegan dishes, including a vegan hash, vegan pancakes and vegan dirty fries.
Hygiene ratings: Food Standards Agency (OGL), refreshed 8 October 2026. They rate hygiene at the last inspection, not the food.
The numbers match the cards above. Select a pin to jump to its card.
Chickpea scramble turns up on a breakfast menu on Elm Hill, a vegan hash on Ber Street, and a whole separate vegan section at a café on Exchange Street. That spread is typical of brunch Norwich offers plant-based eaters: most cafés on this list serve meat as well, yet each prints a key on the menu, and the best brunch in Norwich for a vegan or vegetarian is usually the one that has thought hardest about that key rather than the one with the longest menu.
The cards above give the basics for each café, including the street and the meals it serves. This page fills in what a card cannot: how they differ, what to ask about a cooked plate, and how to get the most out of a morning in the city centre.
Every listing here is a daytime café that serves meat or fish alongside dishes marked vegetarian and vegan. None of them is a specialist plant-based kitchen, and none claims to be. The fully vegan and vegetarian restaurants in the city are lunch and dinner places, so a weekend brunch almost always means a mixed menu.
That is less of a compromise than it sounds. A café that has gone to the trouble of writing a separate vegan breakfast, rather than suggesting the bacon simply be left off, has usually also thought about the toast, the spread and the beans. The menus behind these cards were each read before they went into the guide, and in every case the vegan and vegetarian marks were printed on the café’s own published menu, not just mentioned in passing.
They are also spread around the centre rather than bunched together. Most sit within a few minutes of the market. Olive’s is on Elm Hill. The Ber Street Kitchen is on the ridge south of the shopping streets. Harry’s Soul Station is west of the centre on Adelaide Street, off Dereham Road.
A full vegan breakfast Norwich cafés put on the menu as its own dish, rather than as a list of swaps, is the thing most plant-based eaters are hunting for on a Saturday morning, and several cafés here have one.
No33 Exchange Street, between the market and the Norwich Lanes, runs a separate vegan section with its own breakfast, pancakes and a naanwich. The rest of its menu covers cooked breakfasts, pancakes and loaded brunch plates, with speciality coffee and cakes.
Olive’s on Elm Hill is best known for griddled sandwiches and full cooked breakfasts. Next to the meat options it lists a vegetarian breakfast and a vegan breakfast that includes chickpea scramble and vegan black pudding. The cobbled street outside is one of the best-preserved medieval streets in the city, and Tombland and the cathedral are a short walk up the hill.
The Ber Street Kitchen, on Ber Street to the south of the centre, marks vegetarian and vegan dishes throughout, including a vegan hash, vegan pancakes and vegan dirty fries, and adds hot ciabattas, cakes and barista coffee. It has a courtyard in summer.
Other cafés here suit a different kind of morning.
The Royal Arcade, an Art Nouveau shopping passage off Gentleman’s Walk, is home to ORA Wellness Café. Its menu leans towards açaí bowls, sourdough toasts, protein shakes and matcha. Items are labelled vegetarian, and vegan swaps are offered for the granola, the cheese and the pesto. Chicken and fish appear on the same menu, so read the labels rather than assuming a bowl is plant-based.
Shako Mako, on St Andrews Street at the edge of the Lanes, serves traditional Iraqi home cooking such as kubba, tabsi and fool next to an all-day breakfast, cakes and coffee. The menu uses vegetarian, vegan and vegan-option marks, and the café describes itself as vegan friendly. Fool, a dish of slow-cooked fava (broad) beans eaten across the Middle East, is a good reminder that a savoury morning plate need not involve eggs at all.
Harry’s Soul Station is the outlier: a soul-food restaurant serving burgers, wings, ribs and loaded fries across breakfast, lunch and dinner menus. The menu marks vegan and vegetarian dishes, including veggie and vegan burgers and a vegan bean chilli bowl. It is the place on this list for a heavy, late brunch that runs into the afternoon.
The choice widens for vegetarians who are happy with eggs, butter and cheese. Olive’s lists a vegetarian breakfast separately from its vegan one, ORA Wellness Café labels its vegetarian dishes, and the menus at No33, Shako Mako, Harry’s Soul Station and The Ber Street Kitchen all carry a vegetarian mark as well as a vegan one. A vegetarian cooked breakfast usually means eggs, a meat-free sausage, mushrooms, tomatoes, beans and toast, but the details vary, so the vegetarian mark is the thing to look for rather than an assumption that everything except the bacon is suitable.
Some sit a little away from the centre. The Ber Street Kitchen is a gentle uphill walk south from the shopping streets, and Harry’s Soul Station, on Adelaide Street off Dereham Road, is far enough west that a bus suits some people better than a walk. Either is worth the extra minutes for a group that wants space rather than a seat squeezed in near the market.
On a Saturday, brunch Norwich-style usually means a queue at the door by ten, so the choice often comes down to timing as much as menus. There is no single winner. The best café depends on what kind of brunch you have in mind, and the cafés fall into fairly clear groups.
For a classic cooked plate with a proper vegan equivalent, No33, Olive’s and The Ber Street Kitchen are the strongest choices, because each prints a vegan breakfast as a dish in its own right. For something lighter or sweeter, ORA’s bowls and toasts and the vegan pancakes at No33 and The Ber Street Kitchen fit better. For a savoury plate that is not a fry-up, Shako Mako’s Iraqi dishes are the most distinctive option in the centre. And for a big late brunch with friends who want burgers, Harry’s Soul Station covers both sides of the table.
Location matters too. Olive’s pairs well with a walk round Tombland and the cathedral close; No33 and ORA sit on the market’s doorstep, which is handy if you plan to shop the stalls afterwards; and The Ber Street Kitchen suits anyone walking in from the south of the city.
Most brunch Norwich cafés serve is built around coffee as much as food, and for plenty of people the best brunch in Norwich is simply the one with the best cup. No33 Exchange Street serves speciality coffee with its cakes, The Ber Street Kitchen pours barista coffee, ORA Wellness Café adds matcha and protein shakes, and Shako Mako keeps cakes and coffee going beside its Iraqi dishes.
Plant milk is widely offered at café counters, oat and soya most often, but it is still worth naming it when ordering, because a flat white made with dairy is the default almost everywhere. Cakes are the harder part. A café that marks vegan dishes on its main menu does not always mark its cake counter, which changes daily, so asking at the till is the only reliable check.
Brunch is often a group meal, and groups bring mixed diets. The cafés with the widest spread suit them best. Harry’s Soul Station covers meat eaters and vegans on one menu without anyone ordering a side salad as a meal. The Ber Street Kitchen, with its courtyard in summer, has outdoor space when the weather allows. No33’s separate vegan section means a vegan at the table has a full page to choose from, not a line of swaps.
Smaller cafés, Shako Mako among them, are better for two or three people than for a large party. The listings give no seating numbers, because they change with layouts and seasons, so a large group should check with the café directly before arriving.
A marked menu solves most problems, but a few parts of a full breakfast are worth a quick question, especially at a café where meat and vegan dishes share the kitchen.
None of this is a reason to avoid mixed cafés. It is simply what the vegan mark on a menu does and does not cover. The NHS guidance on eating a vegetarian diet is a useful reference if you are newly cutting out meat and want to keep breakfast balanced.
Ask around for brunch in Norwich and the phrase that comes up most is bottomless brunch: a set-price meal with drinks refilled for a fixed time slot. It is a popular format in the city. This guide covers the food side only, so the cards above are chosen for their marked vegan and vegetarian dishes, not for drinks offers, and none of them is listed here because of one.
A brief aside on the word itself. “Brunch” is usually traced to an 1895 article by the British writer Guy Beringer, “Brunch: A Plea”, which argued for a late Sunday meal to replace the early, heavy one after Saturday night. The idea took decades to catch on, and the vegan pancake would have puzzled him.
On mornings when a café is not in the plan, brunch is one of the easiest meals to cook to the season, and a home version of a vegan breakfast Norwich cafés would recognise needs only a few things. Crumbled firm tofu, fried with onion and a pinch of turmeric for colour, stands in for scrambled egg, and a little kala namak, the Indian black salt, adds the sulphurous note that makes it taste eggy. Beans, grilled tomatoes, mushrooms and good bread do the rest.
The season decides the extras. In late spring, Norfolk asparagus on toast with a squeeze of lemon needs little else. Summer brings tomatoes and courgettes for a hash, and autumn mushrooms fried with garlic and fresh thyme are a reliable vegan centrepiece. The seasonal calendar shows when each crop is at its best in the UK, and the page on thyme substitutes helps if the herb pot is empty.
For brunch out on other days, the homepage lists every checked venue in the city, the Norwich Lanes guide covers the streets where most of these cafés sit, and the journal follows what is arriving in season each fortnight.
Plan for the weekend crowd, since weekend mornings are when brunch cafés anywhere fill up first. Ordering ahead for collection, which No33 and Shako Mako both offer through their own sites, is a quieter way to try the vegan breakfast before committing to a table.
The best brunch in Norwich for vegans usually comes from a café with a properly marked menu. No33 Exchange Street has a separate vegan section. Olive's on Elm Hill lists a full vegan breakfast with chickpea scramble. The Ber Street Kitchen marks a vegan hash and vegan pancakes. Each card links to the café's own menu.
A vegan breakfast Norwich cafés serve is easy to find within a short walk of the market, and each card shows the street. No33 is on Exchange Street. ORA Wellness Café is in the Royal Arcade. Shako Mako is on St Andrews Street. Olive's is on Elm Hill. The Ber Street Kitchen and Harry's Soul Station are a little further out.
The main items are, but small details can slip through. Black pudding is made with blood unless it is labelled vegetarian or vegan, and some kitchens cook everything on one griddle. If shared cooking surfaces matter to you, ask whether the vegetarian items are cooked separately. Hash browns and chips may also share a fryer with meat.
It is a set-price brunch where drinks, usually prosecco or cocktails, are refilled for a fixed time slot alongside a meal. The format is popular in Norwich, but this guide covers the food side of brunch only and does not list venues by their drinks offers. Anyone interested should check the venue's own booking page for current terms.
