Vegan Restaurants Can’t Survive on Outrage Alone
You’ve seen this headline before: “Vegan restaurant starts serving meat.” What follows is as predictable as a rom-com plot.
First, the internet catches fire. People who couldn’t find the restaurant on a map suddenly care deeply about its moral purity. Someone throws a brick through the window. The owner, now genuinely afraid, offers a desperate defence: “Business is tough—we needed customers who actually exist in sufficient numbers.”
Some try diplomacy: “We wanted to be more inclusive.”
Ha! You can’t out-woke woke. It’s like trying to out-loud a screaming toddler.
“Betrayal!” echoes through social media, and soon enough, the restaurant closes or rebrands as “Dave’s Meat Shack.” Because in the vegan world, no heretic goes unpunished.
Now, before anyone starts sharpening their pitchforks: I’m a vegetarian chef running a plant-based restaurant. I understand the outrage. I’d even join the mob myself—if it weren’t for one inconvenient detail: consistency.
Because here’s what I’ve observed after years in this business: people who are absolutely committed to never touching animal products will still choose restaurants based on convenience, social context, and location—just like everyone else. The result? Vegan-exclusive restaurants end up competing for a fraction of their potential customer base’s dining budget. It’s like being married to someone who loves you but keeps having dinner at their ex’s house.
Exhibit A: The Influencer Incident
Recently, a vegan influencer visited my restaurant for her “Best Vegan Restaurants in London” list. We made the cut—thanks! But then we looked closer at her selections: half were famous meat and fish establishments with token kale salads. Grand old temples of carnivory, suddenly transformed into “vegan-friendly hotspots” because they added vegan cake to the afternoon tea menu.
Meanwhile, dozens of genuinely committed vegan restaurants didn’t make her list. Apparently, they lacked the right Instagram aesthetic.
But this influencer isn’t an outlier. She’s just the visible symptom of a much larger problem with how the vegan community actually behaves versus how it demands others behave.
The Economics of Moral Purity
Let’s recap this beautiful contradiction:
If a vegan restaurant decides to serve one single meat dish? Full meltdown. Complete social media destruction.
But if a Michelin-starred steakhouse casually adds a quinoa bowl? Instant praise for being “progressive.”
This is like having a partner who sleeps around freely but loses their mind if you smile at the barista. Fidelity, apparently, works only one way.
The Real Test
Want to know if you actually support plant-based dining? Check your last ten receipts. How many were at exclusively vegan places versus mainstream spots with vegan options?
Your wallet votes louder than your hashtags.
This creates a perverse incentive structure: why would any entrepreneur open a strictly vegan restaurant when consumer behavior patterns reward mainstream restaurants for adding token vegan options, while punishing vegan restaurants for similar compromises? When a struggling vegan restaurant pivots to include meat, they get excommunicated. When a steakhouse adds a plant burger, they get celebrated.
The math doesn’t work. There simply aren’t enough vegans to support 150+ fully vegan restaurants in London when most plant-based meals eaten out are ordered at mainstream venues that offer vegan options. London is estimated to have ~310,000–350,000 vegans; spread across 150 vegan-only restaurants that’s roughly 2,000 potential vegans per venue—and that assumes those customers eat only at vegan restaurants, which evidence contradicts. Between group dining (you can’t always pick the place), convenience, and mainstream chains adding credible plant-based dishes, the customer base for vegan-exclusive venues is too small and too scattered. Meanwhile, roughly one in three UK restaurants close within three years, and niche concepts face even steeper odds. Put bluntly: the market can’t sustain this many specialised vegan restaurants when their core customers frequently dine elsewhere.
Eleven Madison Park in New York City, a three-Michelin-starred restaurant, is reintroducing meat and other animal products to its menu in October 2025. I mean, if even Daniel Humm can’t make it stick long enough, who am I to expect anyone else can?
I didn’t cave… yet. I’m still doing my best to stick to vegetarianism and organic produce. But when I see good vegan or vegetarian places giving up, I understand the desperation. Which brings me to the question no one wants to answer.
A Modest Proposal
If you want exclusivity from your restaurants, you need to offer exclusivity in return. You can’t demand restaurant monogamy while practicing culinary polygamy yourself. Either commit to vegan-exclusive establishments, or accept that restaurants need to survive in a world where not everyone subsists on nutritional yeast and righteous indignation.
Here’s the uncomfortable question nobody wants to answer: If vegans are comfortable enough dining at restaurants that serve meat alongside vegan options, then surely they should be comfortable with previously vegan-exclusive restaurants offering meat in order to survive an economic hurricane?
The logic is inescapable. When you eat at that trendy bistro with one sad vegan option buried on page three of the menu, you’re voting with your wallet that mixed menus are acceptable. But when a struggling vegan restaurant makes the same compromise in reverse—adding conventional options to stay afloat—suddenly it’s a moral catastrophe worthy of protests and boycotts.
You can’t have it both ways.
Because right now, the message is clear: protesting is more exciting than actually supporting a business. It’s more fun to be outraged online than to show up on a Tuesday night when restaurants actually need customers.
The economy isn’t great for London restaurants right now. For vegetarian or vegan restaurants with a fraction of the potential clientele? It’s much worse. They say opening a restaurant is like swimming across the Channel. Opening a vegetarian or vegan restaurant is doing the same swim with your hands tied behind your back. But I’m still swimming.
I haven’t caved… yet. I’m still doing my best to stick to vegetarianism and organic produce. But when I see a good vegan or vegetarian place giving up, I understand. And I will never judge the owners when a vegan restaurant seeks to broaden their clientele by adding meat to the menu.
The community can keep playing purity police with struggling plant-based restaurants while giving standing ovations to mega-chains for adding oat milk. But don’t be surprised when the restaurants you claim to care about keep disappearing.
Actions, as they say, speak louder than protests.
