Lille Allen
With restaurants trying to cater to the widest possible audience, why do so many still miss the mark with vegan and vegetarian food?
No one walks into a barbecue restaurant or a smash burger joint expecting plentiful plant-based options. But on a beautiful fall Sunday, with a group of friends of various dietary needs, I did not expect to walk into a pub in tony Brooklyn and see nary a vegan item on the menu. Not even the fries, which came with aioli instead of ketchup, and which served as the only vegetarian item on the menu. This was a pub, a style of restaurant which purports to be for every kind of person. The omission was glaring.
Vegan dining has made incredible strides since I had, I’m sorry to say, the worst cake of my life at a high school birthday party. Sad substitutions of applesauce and banana for every conceivable ingredient has turned into rich cultured plant-based cheeses, flavorful “fake meats,” and more respect and understanding of cultures for whom vegan eating has been the norm for centuries. And while just four percent of Americans identify as vegetarian and only one percent as vegan, the number of adults wanting to incorporate more plant-based eating into their lives appears to be on the rise.
The increase in modern diners and all-day cafes means more chefs are attempting to cater to the widest possible audience, and indeed often can’t afford to alienate customers over dietary restrictions. It’s clear that many are trying to ensure plentiful options. But menus need to change a lot more before many restaurants can really call themselves “for everyone.”
“A lot of restaurants should have that forethought of having a vegetarian or vegan option on the menu,” says Brian Cortes, chef de cuisine at Sour Duck Market, an all-day cafe and beer garden in Austin, Texas. Sour Duck serves a lengthy menu of Tex-Mex-inflected favorites, like breakfast burritos, fried chicken, and pastries. “From a business perspective, you never want to turn any guests away.” For the vegetarian and vegan options, Cortes says he often takes cues from the local farms they source from and challenges himself to see if he can make certain dishes without meat or dairy. “As a chef you should be able to create delicious food that’s also vegan,” he says.
Challenging himself to not rely on meat products in every dish is how Mike Stankovich found himself accidentally overseeing a hub for vegan diners in Cincinnati, even though his restaurant, Mid-City, isn’t vegan. Stankovich says he grew up in the punk scene and has always been around vegans, so making sure vegan diners aren’t stuck with fries and a dry salad has always been top of mind. Soon, he found that the best-sellers were consistently the vegan and vegetarian items, like vegetable tempura and seasonal soups. Stankovich has also built a reputation as being flexible with the rest of the menu, actively trying to make vegetarian versions of things, and keeping a separate vegan fryer in the kitchen. “It was always conscious for us to be adaptable to various diets,” he says, “because it always kind of annoyed me when I’d see a restaurant that wouldn’t change something.”
When considering vegan and vegetarian diners, Cortes says it’s not about ensuring some percentage of the menu is always vegan, but “trying to make sure there’s a good amount of a variety of different things.” And what a “good amount” is depends on the restaurant. Sour Duck’s lengthy menu, for instance, shows a few vegan items, and many more that could potentially be made vegan if you were to ask. Mid-City’s menu is much shorter, but one vegan entree out of six comes off much differently than one out of 20.
For Madalyn Durrant, executive chef at Bar Parisette in Chicago, “managing expectations is important. So if you are going to say we have something for everyone, you need to be really clear about what you think that means.” Durrant takes her inspiration from French cuisine, without adhering strictly to bistro or brasserie traditions, which she says lets her take more liberties with vegetarian and vegan options. But balancing the menu, she says, is about thinking about it from a guest perspective. Durrant asks herself if a prospective diner were looking at the menu, could they order something that would make them “feel full and happy and healthy and like they received nourishment?”
Most diners’ entry point to a restaurant is a menu posted online, or images and descriptions on social media. Tim Donnelly, co-founder of New York news website the New York Groove, became frustrated recently when looking at the menu for the revamped Kellogg’s Diner — which Resy describes as for “anyone lusting after a modern diner with a long, diverse menu of reasonably priced food.” At first pass, the ample menu appears to have very few vegetarian options, and even fewer vegan ones. There’s a cashew queso, a veggie burger, and one entree of 17 that doesn’t include meat. “The idea that a place could open in 2024 in the heart of a quote unquote cool neighborhood, and not have an inclusive menu, is pretty surprising,” says Donnelly, who has been vegan for 14 years. “You guys can’t figure out how to make a pancake without an egg in it?” (Kellogg’s Diner did not respond to a request for comment.)
Despite best intentions, there still seems to be a communication gulf between chefs and diners about vegetarian and vegan dining. Stankovich says he doesn’t publicly list that there is a separate vegan fryer, and that Mid-City has mostly garnered its reputation among vegans and vegetarians through word of mouth. Every chef I spoke to insisted they are more than willing to accommodate — if asked. Durrant says she loves when vegan diners call ahead and give her a chance to make more vegan food. “It’s really easy, and we’re super happy to help out in those moments,” she says. “If I can do better than a dry salad and fries and make someone happy, then that’s important to me.”
But all that requires a vegan diner to be willing to do the legwork of reaching out to the restaurant, which they may not be inclined to do if they look online and don’t immediately see anything for them. “Most people, if they look at the menu there’s nothing vegan on it, they’re just going to be like, okay I’m going to go somewhere else,” says Donnelly. “If a regular restaurant wants lots of people to come, it’s not hard to just label something, or put on your menu that you can make anything vegan.” Some of this is as easy as more restaurants adopting a visual reference system on menus, with icons denoting vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, and other common dietary restrictions, or shouting out accommodations like keeping a separate vegan fryer or griddle. It takes out the guesswork of figuring out which dish sounds vegan but is actually made with butter, or what can easily and willingly be made vegetarian by the kitchen.
It wasn’t so long ago that David Chang was openly antagonistic toward vegetarians and vegans who wanted to eat at his restaurants. “You don’t go to a BBQ restaurant and be like, ‘I want everything vegetarian.’… Our restaurants are what we serve. And if you don’t like it you can go eat somewhere else,” he said. His sentiments were echoed by the likes of Anthony Bourdain (who once wrote that vegetarians and vegans are “enemies of everything that’s good and decent in the human spirit”) and Gordon Ramsay. Chang has a point; You don’t go to an Italian restaurant and demand a catfish po’ boy. Chefs have always had to balance their art with hospitality, serving an honest expression of their chosen cuisine and craft, and deciding how much they’re willing to change that to ensure the customer is happy. Often, the amount they’re willing to change is none at all.
But this implies that a chef shouldn’t care about serving vegan and vegetarian diners, which is an increasingly unacceptable stance, indicative of both frustrating stubbornness and a real lack of creativity. And while a steakhouse may be understandably more focused on steak than an Impossible burger, at diners and all-day cafes the point is serving everyone.
We’ve certainly come a long way; it’s now flat out surprising to not see a single at least vegetarian option on a restaurant menu. Stankovich notes that even the chili chain Gold Star recently came out with vegetarian Cincinnati chili. But he also says that sometimes there’s a broken feedback loop, where chefs begrudgingly put a vegan dish on the menu without thought, no one orders it because it’s bad, and chefs conclude vegan dishes don’t sell. “Then they think it’s not worth doing, but really it’s that they’re not cooking it properly,” he says.
The Brooklyn pub of course had ketchup on hand, and was more than willing to serve the fries with that as the side. You can always ask for what you need. But to really be for everyone, more restaurants need to show they’re willing to answer yes.
