LA vegan restaurants are putting meat back on the menu | Hacker News Reader

LA vegan restaurants are putting meat back on the menu

sfgate.com

13 pointssbuttgereit16 comments

I wonder if this is a downtrend in vegan restaurants in general, or just vegan burger joints specifically.

As a "non-preachy" vegan, when I dine out with others, we usually go places where there's options for everyone. They try to do the same for me too.

Once in a while, I'll still go to an all-vegan place with certain friends, but that's because that place offers something special... a plant based menu that tries to be its own thing, not just overpriced fast food.

If it's just burgers and fries, many places have Beyond and Impossible burgers already. No need to specifically go to a vegan place where the omnivores are just going to be disappointed.

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Edit: It's also just a lot easier these days in general. Many many restaurants have vegan options, if not directly labeled as such, at least easily modifiable to become such. Apps like HappyCow also make it easier to find these places.

I always thought this was the more sensible option anyway (every restaurant having a couple options, rathed than a couple restaurants having only vegan options). It's not like it was 10 or 15 years ago when people didn't even know what the word meant.

Vegan restaurants exist for a reason - people like having more than one option when they go out. Imagine getting basically the same burger wherever you go because that's the thing on the menu you can eat. It's better than nothing but it gets boring really fast.

The number of vegan restaurants compared to the actual demand right now is too high though, especially fast food vegan places that can't differentiate themselves well because they all use the same substitute products without doing much to them.

I guess it kinda depends where you live. In some bigger cities especially, many "normal" restaurants these days will have a vegan version of what they make for omnivores, whether that's pizza or crepes or dumplings or ramen or a rice bowl or pastries or ethnic or whatever.

But a vegan burger place? Man, that's like next-level boring lol. Exactly what you said, hard to differentiate. There are vegan fast food places like Native Foods and Veggie Grill, but even they have way more options than burgers.

I think there was a big jump in novelty for some alternative meat products the past few years which are now waning - Panda Express pulled their vegi orange chikn experiment (ugh!) and have read sales of Impossible/Beyond are not doing well aside from chik'n products. Am glad field roast seems to be doing fine though; there's always tofu at an Asian restaurant

Yeah, that's a good point! So many companies made so many products in like 2 or 3 years, and then the fad died and that was that.

I’m all for vegan food but if you do that it’s got to be vegan first, not over processed animal product imitations. Vegan patties are not healthy and barely ok, vegan cheese is one of the nastiest things I’ve ever eaten. But you can absolutely make a vegan soup, salad, pasta, bread, mushroom dish etc that is amazing, it’s just hard because all the ingredients need to shine.

You're painting with very broad strokes here

What’s so good about imitation foods? Change my mind… m

I wonder if it is easier for fast food to stay consistently vegan than a sit-down restaurant. For example, holes in the wall or food trucks that sell takeaway Middle Eastern staples like falafel or koshary. Sit-down places have too much space that, with soaring rents in so many countries, costs too much money.

Manhattan seems to have more staying power for vegan places than LA - our double zero branch is still here and new vegan places like neat burger have been opening. Not sure why, though

I live in Los Angeles and there’s a huge variety of vegan places here, it’s never a problem. Whenever I visit New York I feel like I can’t find any vegan food after 8pm.

Happy cow has 654 Vegan restaurants in LA and 1072 in NYC.

https://www.happycow.net/north_america/usa/california/los_an...

https://www.happycow.net/north_america/usa/new_york/new_york...

And with the geographic distribution of the 2 cities Manhattan probably has a much higher concentration as well.

Maybe they’re not in Manhattan? I could barely find anything Using Google Maps and Yelp. And unlike Los Angeles, most places simply don’t have any vegan options.

I accidentally went to a vegan burger place in Montreal... in retrospect it should have been more obvious, but I didn't realize until reading the fine print on the menu...

Why are vegan restaurants so allergic to olive oil?

Never noticed that. My guess is that restaurants in general don't use olive oil very often because it's several times more expensive than vegetable oil. Saying that, fine dining vegan restaurants do use olive oil e.g. in salads.

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