Sacramento’s vegan scene is exploding with comfort food, plant-based ‘meat’ and more

Cider-battered cauliflower sits tightly in a tortilla with a chipotle cream slaw and avocado verde salsa. At the next table over, slices of sourdough bread slathered with egg-free aioli sandwich a mock tuna melt of oyster mushrooms, whole garbanzo beans, sweet onions and charred artichokes.

Bambi Vegan Tacos might not be 100% tacos, but it’s 100% vegan. Opened in September 2018 after three years food-trucking around the region, the restaurant at 1725 I St. has been well-greeted so far, with five stars on Yelp after more than 100 reviews.

An all-vegan midtown restaurant isn’t so much of an anomaly these days as it is a cultural indication. Plant-based eating has gotten increasingly popular around Sacramento, as evidenced by the dozens of vegan and vegan-friendly restaurants now open, and scientific advancements have led to better food sans animal products.

Veganism doesn’t just have to be healthy now. It can be fun. From honey walnut “shrimp” at Vegan Deadly Sins to fried chick’n sandwiches at Pure Soul Plant-Based Eats to cashew cream gelato at Conscious Creamery, plant-based comfort food has become easier and easier to find around Sacramento over the last three or four years. Bennett’s American Cooking in The UV shopping center (formerly known as University Village) even featured a steak special last August made from mycoprotein, the building blocks of mushrooms.

“If you like it as a food, it probably exists in a vegan form in Sacramento,” said Sacramento Vegan Chef Challenge organizer Caroline Soto. “People want to have comfort food, and being able to have the comfort food without the animal is pretty awesome.”

MORE AND MORE OPTIONS

As the joke goes: how do you know someone’s vegan? Don’t worry, they’ll tell you.

Sacramento has an impassioned vegan community, one unmatched by those following gluten-free, paleo or vegetarian diets. Part of it stems from the moral reasoning — veganism is often not just a dietary choice, it’s people taking a stand for animal rights and/or environmental justice.

Soto went vegan on a bet shortly after moving back to Sacramento in 2012, and never looked back. She started a Sac Vegan Pop-ups page Instagram in 2019, which now has more than 5,400 followers, and took over the annual Vegan Chef Challenge with co-leader Kristy Venrick-Mardon before last October’s monthlong event.

“Everyone’s on their own journey, and it took me over 25 years to find that path. I think once you do, it’s nice to have other people around that feel that same way, because food is a daily choice that we make,” Soto said. “It’s so very integrated into our everyday lives, so it’s nice to have a community that supports that, because it can be difficult. But honestly, in Sacramento it’s getting easier by the day.”

Polls show anywhere between 2 to 6% of U.S. residents are vegan. Soto hesitated to estimate the percentage for Sacramento, noting that vegans often seem more prevalent because they’re more vocal about their choices than omnivores.

Self-determination also makes it difficult to nail a number down — someone might identify as vegan but cheat with a piece of cheese from time to time, which others might call vegetarianism.

Even at the high end of that estimate, appealing to omnivorous customers is a business imperative for all-vegan restaurants. Burger Patch co-owner Phil Horn has said he knows vegans would visit his first plant-based fast food stand, but he needs meat eaters to be curious enough to try it at least once a year for his business model to work.

Bambi Vegan Tacos will soon be rebranded as just Bambi, co-owner Lizz Gibb said. She and partner Chad Novick, a former cook at Grange and Mother, don’t eat 100% vegan in their personal lives. If they did, she said, they wouldn’t be able to take inspiration from as many flavors — and recast them in a vegan light.

They want to pull in fellow omnivores by dropping “vegan” from the restaurant’s name. While all items will remain vegan, Gibb hopes people pick the house Bambi taco because they want to try a crimini mushroom-based take on Jimboy’s ground beef taco, not just because her version is plant-based.

“Although we are a completely vegan restaurant, we want to be a restaurant that has great food that just happens to be vegan,” Gibb said. “We think that’s important to bring veganism to the mainstream.”

Fortunately, Soto said, people in the Farm-to-Fork Capital are pretty game to eat their veggies. Quiz people about their dietary choices at vegan pop-up events around Sacramento, she said, and you’ll find a healthy mix of “flexitarians” in addition to the fully committed.

OLD AND NEW

Many cultures already abstain from certain animal products: Hindus don’t eat beef, Muslims shun pork. Cow’s milk isn’t a major part of most Chinese diets. It’s unsurprising, then, that Asian cuisines tend to be easily adaptable to veganism.

Anna’s Vegan Cafe has been a plant-based destination at 3500 Stockton Blvd. for the last 15 years. First opened as Loving Hut — an all-vegan chain with an Elk Grove location — before becoming Au Lac Veggie and then its current name, the restaurant was bought by couple Vu Tran and Dep Huynh in 2019.

Currently open only for takeout, Anna’s food can best be described as pan-Asian. Sweet-and-sour “drumsticks” share menu space with curry eggplant soup and vermicelli barbecue plates, and dishes top out at $10. Many riff on family recipes, Tran and Huynh wrote in an email.

It’s one of the oldest all-vegan restaurants in the region, yet Anna’s Vegan Cafe isn’t bothered by the increased competition as of late. More plant-based restaurants birth more plant-based or vegan-curious eaters, the owners said.

“We are glad when there are more vegan restaurants opening around us, and more customers that come to us for healthy vegan food,” Tran and Huynh wrote. “That just means that people are starting to realize the importance of being healthy and nature friendly.”

Plant-based dining gradually became more popular and available around Sacramento over the last decade, but the scene really exploded over the last three or four years. Drip Espresso opened in midtown Sacramento last month, just a block from Veg Cafe and Babes Ice Cream & Donuts and two blocks from the original Burger Patch. Bambi Vegan Tacos and Vegan Deadly Sins, too, are less than a mile way.

All exclusively serve plant-based food, and all but Veg Cafe have opened since 2019. In fact, Burger Patch is now building out its fourth location, and was the official restaurant partner of the 2021 World’s Strongest Man competition in Old Sacramento.

“When I started (the Sac Vegan Pop-up page) in 2019, there was kind of a few (vegan-only restaurants) here and there,” Soto said. “It’s been very crazy to see the demand for vegan food in Sacramento ... since I started that, it has just skyrocketed.”

Meat- and dairy-serving restaurants are making more concessions for vegans, too, and some like The Paisley Cafe in Orangevale have adopted entire plant-based menus to complement their standard ones. Look for pretty much every restaurant to have at least one or two vegan menu options in the near future, Soto said.

Gibb lives upstairs from Bambi with her 16-year-old daughter — “a real Bob’s Burgers situation,” she said — who has been vegan for the last decade. Eating together is rarely a challenge, she said, despite their dietary differences.

“It’s much easier to eat vegan or plant-based or even just cut down on much meat or dairy you consume than people would normally think,” Gibb said. “I have not had any difficulty switching over in that way.”

Then she paused. “I mean, I guess it’s easy because I own a vegan restaurant.”

This story was originally published March 4, 2022 at 3:25 AM.