How Veganism Got Cooked |
The plan had been to meet the vegan chef and cookbook author Isa Chandra Moskowitz at one of her old haunts for dinner, but the problem was none of them was left. “That scrambled-tofu heyday is gone. I can’t think of a single fucking place to get tempeh, except, like, maybe Wild Ginger,” she told me, referring to the mid-aughts Pan-Asian mini-chain. You could have gotten it at Modern Love, her vegan comfort spot in Williamsburg, but even she had closed up shop. On the bright side, she was newly available to meet me at 5 p.m. on a Tuesday.
Moskowitz is not a conventional celebrity, but she is extraordinarily famous to an extraordinarily small number of people. Mainly, vegans. Specifically, vegans in or rapidly approaching middle age. “If someone recognizes me, their joints probably hurt,” she said. “Or their mother likes me.” As a vegan of increasingly middle-aged experience, I found this assessment unsettling. “I love it,” she added. She officially gave up meat at 15 and discovered both veganism and leftist politics through the New York City punk scene of the late ’80s. Her culinary history is a portrait of a city that no longer exists. As a teenage high-school dropout, she learned to butcher broccoli and make soups taste good while cooking for Food Not Bombs in the East Village, and though she went on to work in professional kitchens, she stayed true to her anarchist-punk DIY roots. The Post Punk Kitchen, her gleefully low-budget cooking show on Brooklyn Community Access Television, led to an ever-growing canon of voice-y vegan cookbooks, which made way for the restaurant. She opened Modern Love in Omaha, where she happened to be living, in 2014, then two years later she opened a second one on Union Avenue in Williamsburg. Then both restaurants closed. Omaha went first, at the end of 2024; six months later, she shuttered Brooklyn.
“Picture how hard running a restaurant is normally and then just picture someone’s foot on your neck while you’re trying to run it,” she said. She philosophically refused to lean on premade meat alternatives, not because they’re unappetizing — she keeps them in her freezer — but because they do not taste like love. “If I go out to eat, I want to taste the soul of the food,” she said. But that means more steps. Buying fish or cheese or chicken and then cooking it is significantly easier than turning mushrooms into brisket or cashews into cheese. “You just need to prep so much,” she said, sighing. Eating patterns had changed, seemingly forever; by the time she closed up shop in Brooklyn, 60 to 70 percent of orders were for delivery, placed on apps that took a 15 to 30 percent cut. That wasn’t a vegan problem — the apps have come for everyone — except that vegan restaurants have always been hubs for the like-minded: “When it opened, community was important. I was able to be there and talk to tables. I wasn’t always in the back on the phone with fucking Grubhub.” Sales went up, but profits went down. The only way to fill the restaurant, it turned out, was to announce that it was over. “It was nice to see how much everybody loved us, because before that, I had been like, Everybody hates us,” she said. “It was just like, What happened? ”
What happened is that as the city settled into its new post-pandemic normal, the vegan restaurants began to close. On the Upper West Side, Blossom shuttered its final location in the summer of 2024, the same month that Guevara’s, the Cuban café that had been a rising star of the pandemic, called it quits in Clinton Hill and then in Williamsburg. In Harlem, Seasoned Vegan closed and then reopened with a new East Village concept and then, this past spring, that version closed, too. The vegan slice shop Screamer’s closed, and Terms of Endearment closed, and Hartbreakers closed, and the vegan diner Champs was briefly revived as Ro’s, which also closed. The vegan bloodbath seemed to transcend category, aesthetic, age, and borough: Vegetarian Dim Sum House in Chinatown, a pillar since the ’80s; the old-school brown-rice-and-tahini joint the Organic Grill; and the casual Dominican spot the Vegan Factory in the Bronx. By mid-2025, Slutty Vegan was down to one New York location. Planta, a once-growing empire of clubby Japanese-style hot spots, filed for and was acquired out of bankruptcy; the Williamsburg location served its final ahi watermelon nigiri last spring.
Then, this past August, Daniel Humm announced that Eleven Madison Park, which had divested from animal products to extreme fanfare four years earlier, would go back to serving meat. It was a business decision — private events, especially, were down — but it was also, he insisted, the result of a philosophical evolution. “I didn’t realize,” he told the New York Times, “that we would exclude people.”
Had I asked six months ago, the vegan restaurateur Ravi Derossi told me, sitting in his mostly unfurnished office, he’d have said this was not a story. Yes, it had become the narrative that vegan restaurants were closing, but, actually, all restaurants were. “The press likes to talk about how vegan restaurants are closing, not because it’s only vegan restaurants that are closing but because there’s a lot of people who like to talk shit about vegan restaurants.”
But by the time we met in late October, Derossi had changed his mind. “Hospitality in general is getting killed,” he maintained, citing both statistics and the industry experiences of his many omnivorous friends. “But it’s also a vegan thing.” It wasn’t just that vegan restaurants were closing but that they weren’t being replaced. Between 2020 and 2024, the number of new entrants in the New York metro area, a spokesperson from Yelp told me, had been fairly consistent; according to its data, there had been an average of 47 vegan openings each year. In the past year, there were 14.
If it were only New York restaurants where vegans seemed to be losing ground — or only in New York, or only in restaurants — you could maybe chalk it up to material conditions, something about rising rents, the death of counterculture, the decline of public life. But it isn’t. At American grocery stores and other retailers, sales of vegan meats fell 7.5 percent leading into the spring of 2025. At its peak in 2020, the U.S. plant-based-protein retail market did $1.54 billion in sales; in 2025, it did $1.17 billion. While it is normal for an emerging market to stabilize, one analyst told me, she acknowledged it was “a pretty big decline.” Peter McGuinness, the CEO of Impossible Foods, which less than a decade earlier had helped to pioneer the New Wave of beefy beefless burgers, was frank: “The category is smaller today than it was two years ago, four years ago, five years ago. That’s not good.” Beyond Meat, its primary competitor, once valued at more than $14 billion, announced a debt-restructuring deal to fend off bankruptcy and briefly became a meme stock. Slowly, without making a big fuss, buzzy vegan offerings that had briefly and loudly dotted fast-food menus seemed to disappear. What did not disappear was actual meat. Americans were buying more of it than ever. In 2024, U.S. sales hit a record $104.6 billion.
“I’ve known hundreds, if not thousands, of vegans, and most of them aren’t anymore,” Moskowitz told me. “I think people get fatigued, and it’s hard, and it starts feeling pointless.” You give up meat and eggs and milk and fish and make your life, in perpetuity, just slightly less convenient, and you alienate your mother and can’t eat your best friend’s birthday cake, and for what? Because, through your dietary choices, you’ve eliminated suffering? Because you’re trying to save the world?
There had been so much excitement! From the 2010s through the pandemic, there seemed to be a growing consensus. The global temperature was rising at an alarming rate, and meat was part of the problem. It wasn’t just that animal agriculture, especially cattle, was responsible for a significant percentage of greenhouse-gas emissions — you didn’t even have to care about that. There was an expanding body of evidence that eating lots of meat was bad for you. The WHO linked processed meats to cancer, and pretty much any cause of death that you could think of seemed to correlate with the consumption of red meat. There were documentaries about all of it, Cowspiracy and Dominion and The Game Changers, arguing that the world was being ravaged by the consumption of tortured animals, all while you could achieve peak human performance eating only plants.
People have been following meat-free diets forever (or at least for several millennia). But the promise of the 2010s was that now this lifestyle was going mainstream. Veganism had become, if not cool, then at least to some degree aspirational. It was no........