Good morning and welcome to Vittles** Restaurants**.
In today’s newsletter we are sharing our first ever vegan guide. While much has been made in the last year or two about the closure of many of the city’s vegan spots, this guide proves that there is still plenty of great plant-based food available in London. We cast a wide net, and have included both dedicated vegan restaurants and places that have a couple of standout plant-based dishes. And while the final list of 99 recommendations does include some places that readers will probably already be familiar with, we hope that even the most seasoned London vegans will discover something new.
To view the whole guide and map, you can subscribe to *Vittles *below for £7 a month or £59 for the year, which gives you full access to the back catalogue of features, essays, recipes, reviews and all our other restaurant guides, including Jonathan Nunn’s list of the 99 best restaurants in London.
A kind of plant-based 99 for London
By many accounts, it’s never been a worse time to be vegan in London. For every gleeful Daily Mail story declaring the ‘death of veganism’, there’s also a frustrated lament for the shutdown of a beloved and once successful-seeming independent** restaurant. This steady spate of closures has left London’s vegans in a state of near-constant mourning. There are restaurants we’d intended to include in this guide, only to learn in the process of writing that they’d already closed. **Yet despite the doom and gloom coming from all sides, London’s vegan options still rank among the best in the world. This guide is our attempt to introduce you to some of our favourites.
When talking about London’s vegan scene – what’s survived, what’s shuttered, what’s hanging on by the skin of its teeth – the plant-based boom of the mid-2010s is posited as a turning point. (As we’re talking about food specifically, we’ll be using ‘vegan’ and ‘plant-based’ interchangeably throughout this guide.) Veganism went mainstream… by which we mean corporations were capitalising on a trend, reducing a rich global history of plant-based eating to ever more realistic fake meat or, at the other end of the spectrum, making it into another strand of so-called ‘clean’ eating. The core ethical tenets were stripped away to laughable levels – just ask anyone who remembers the Tom Kerridge-backed Camden spot Bad Vegan, which was bad precisely because it served meat (and closed after two years).
The establishments and products that emerged under corporate veganism rarely lasted on high streets (or shelves) for long; parent companies and investors had new trends to turn their attention to, after all. But London’s plant-based scene and vegan history go so much deeper than that mainstream moment. Although in the mainstream – at least in the West – veganism has long been associated with whiteness, the ideologies adopted by the vegan movement have been present in communities of colour for centuries, whether for religious reasons or the historical or geographical availability of plant-based ingredients, as Khushbu Shah wrote in Thrillist in 2018. Rice and beans, dal, fish-fragrant aubergine, injera: all beloved dishes, yet ones thought of as staples first, vegan dishes later.
In the wake of so many veganism-as-trend restaurants shutting, it feels telling that it is these longstanding restaurants, where plant-based ingredients are organically integrated into the cuisine, that are thriving. If one thing unites these establishments of old with the newer wave that make up London’s contemporary vegan scene, it’s that they’re not trying to trick anyone into eating plant-based. Imitation meat has by no means been sidelined, but there’s now more of a focus on traditional mock meats like seitan and soya, or other protein sources such as tofu and tempeh. And, in an increasing number of cases, vegetables themselves are treated as the principal ingredients in a dish, rather than merely the support act.
This long-awaited Vittles vegan guide caters to vegan and vegetarian lifers, yes, but also to anyone who simply enjoys eating fantastic food. The list of 99 is varied: you’ll find pure plant-based places, vegetable-focused vegetarian spots and all-rounder restaurants with unexpectedly excellent vegan options. Something for everyone, we hope. Isobel Lewis
Contributors:IL - Isobel Lewis;
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Note: the list is organised by geography. It features one surprise category and one which is its own category precisely because it is entirely unsurprising.
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**Kanazawa **vfIt’s funny that no snack challenger has emerged to duke it out with Greggs’ famed vegan sausage roll. I’m proud to report I may have found a contender in the curry bread at
**Community Cafe at 5 Pancras Square **vgDelicious soft serve for £1? The chance to take down our tech overlords? Located inside the library at
**Tenmaru **vfThere are three compelling reasons to visit
Corrochio’s vfBig nights start with tacos and margs, and Dalston fixture
**Café Palestina **vfHope underpins
**Chuku’s **vfA veteran of the Nigerian New Wave,
**House of Momo **vfOde to my favourite momo at
**Rasa **vFor a big meal with loved ones, few places do vegetarian value quite like Stoke Newington institution
**All Nations Vegan **vgWhile the vegan food scene from a Western lens has been whitewashed and re-packaged, when I think of vegan, I immediately think of Ital. The word derives from the English word ‘vital’ and it was rooted in Rastafari culture long before ‘vegan’ was coined by The Vegan Society. The best way to order at
Below the paywall: 89 more recommendations from across the city, plus the Vittles Vegan 99 MAP
