When vegan Nikki Kranz moved to Atlanta from Memphis in the late 1990s as a teenager, she was delighted in the dining options available. “I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, there are six restaurants I can eat at,’” Kranz recalled. “That was a big deal at the time.”
The vegan and vegetarian scenes in Atlanta have changed quite a bit since then.
Before the advent of social media, Kranz and her fellow vegans relied on the website HappyCow to find suitable dining options in the Atlanta area. The site depended on users to update it, however, and wasn’t necessarily the most reliable source.
“You’d go to a restaurant and discover it closed two years ago,” Kranz said.
Her early go-to spots were Chinese restaurant Harmony Vegetarian, Cafe Sunflower and Soul Vegetarian #2. It wasn’t until the early 2000s, when Yelp and Twitter started, that Kranz saw a shift in Atlanta’s vegan scene. People could share their favorite spots in real time and an online community formed. Today, Kranz moderates a Vegan Atlanta group on Facebook with about 11,000 members.
Credit: Becky Stein
Credit: Becky Stein
Some of the earliest pioneers of vegan food in Atlanta can be found in the West End, where restaurants such as Soul Vegetarian #1 long have catered to the local community. In recent times, the neighborhood has become a hotbed of vegan restaurants, with such options as Tassili’s Raw Reality, Caribbean-inspired Healthful Essence and Bakaris Plant Based Pizza. They continue to thrive, with people often waiting in long lines at Tassili’s for a massive wrap stuffed with kale and couscous.
One of the first restaurants to bring vegan and vegetarian dining options to a wider audience was R. Thomas Deluxe Grill, which the late Richard Thomas opened in 1985. The Buckhead restaurant began as a fine-dining spot, General Manager Brittany Curran said. Before opening the restaurant, Thomas was a fast-food entrepreneur. “He felt guilty about the type of food that he was giving people, because food is healing, food is your body,” Curran said, “and he created this place.”
At R. Thomas, veggie-friendly options such as the breakfast quinoa bowl with scrambled eggs, or the meatless loaf with peppers and mashed potatoes, sit happily on the menu next to hearty classics like the chicken king omelet.
While Atlanta’s vegan and vegetarian dining options continue to expand, R. Thomas persists thanks to its quirky atmosphere and unique offerings. ”It’s one of those local places you can’t find anywhere else, with unique combinations of items,” Curran said. One of the most popular dishes on the menu is the Thai Express bowl, which has sautéed red cabbage, red onions, broccoli, carrots and cilantro tossed in a peanut dressing and served over rosemary quinoa.
Lee Allen grew up in Atlanta and remembers when, as a vegan teen, she’d have to modify her orders heavily at Willy’s and Moe’s. Eventually, she worked in fine-dining restaurants like Bacchanalia and observed the shift in attitude toward vegetarians and vegans from within the industry.
“When I first started working in restaurants, there was definitely a vibe of, ‘Ugh, vegetarians are coming in. What are we going to serve them? Let’s throw something together,’” Allen said.
Over time, however, as food sensitivity awareness and interest in plant-based diets expanded, she noticed that Staplehouse and other restaurants were happy to accommodate meat-free diners. “They started thinking about it more seriously and maybe got more excited about composing those sorts of dishes,” Allen said.
Credit: Courtesy of Madelynne Boykin
Credit: Courtesy of Madelynne Boykin
As plant-based diets became more popular, Atlanta experienced a boom of undeniably cool vegan places. Upbeet opened in 2017, bringing artfully crafted vegan and vegetarian bowls to the area west of Midtown, while Pinky Cole opened her Slutty Vegan in the Westview area in 2019, serving Impossible patties topped with cheekily named combinations.
The past year saw Miami-based Planta open two Atlanta locations, and even restaurants that aren’t strictly plant-based offer veggie options, such as Bona Fide Deluxe, with its cauliflower and rapini sandwich with lemon yogurt, or Fox Bros. Bar-B-Q’s location at the Works, which has a pulled mushroom sandwich served on a vegan bun.
Credit: Courtesy of Planta
Credit: Courtesy of Planta
One of the hottest vegan restaurants is Reynoldstown’s La Semilla, which opened at the end of 2022. Husband-and-wife co-owners Reid and Sophia Trapani went vegan in 2017 and quickly started perfecting their recipes with the help of Rouxbe, an online culinary school, familiarizing themselves with such ingredients as jackfruit and seitan. They launched a catering service, Happy Seed, in 2018, and as they staged pop-ups around town, they saw a demand for delicious, highly executed vegan food.
The feedback was glowing, Sophia Trapani said, and “it wasn’t just vegans that were at those events.”
Now, at La Semilla, the Trapanis serve vegan versions of Latin dishes, including a Cubano sandwich and tangy-spicy queso blanco.
As for where vegan food in Atlanta is headed, Sophia Trapani believes it’s only up from here. “There can always be more,” she said, “we’re not a New York, Miami, L.A., but I think with the growing population and people being more mindful to what they consume, it’s just going to trend upward.”
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