Comment by solardev | Hacker News Reader

Comment by solardev | Hacker News Reader

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.

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