Soda Club Pasta. Credit: Overthrow Hospitality

The Secret to Great Vegan Food? Stop Calling It Vegan

7 Minute read

04 Nov 2025

Joel Stein

Writer

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Forget fake meat. The smartest vegan chefs aren’t mimicking anything—they’re just cooking food people want to eat.

Four years ago, I cooked a giant dinner made entirely of fake meat. We had “bacon” made from mycelium, “eggs” from mung beans, “cheese” from coconut oil, and ice cream made from beta-lactoglobulin produced by microflora.

The next day, I ran into my neighbor Moby, the musician who used to own the vegan restaurant Little Pine in L.A. Five minutes into my brag about the dinner, he said he’d never eat any of that food. Why, he wondered, did people need to Rube Goldberg meats when so much vegan food is already great?

People are coming around to Moby’s argument. Ten years ago, vegan restaurants marketed themselves as fine dining for people who didn’t eat animal products (Crossroads in L.A.; New York City’s Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s ABCV, by CHLOE, Nix, and Eleven Madison Park). Now, you can eat at a vegan place without ever realizing it, which is exactly what happened when my 85-year-old father went to Soda Club in New York.

“That happens all the time,” says Drew Brady, COO and partner at Overthrow Hospitality, which owns Soda Club along with New York spots Avant Garden, Ladybird, Third Kingdom, Al Andalus, and the upcoming Long Count. That restaurant, opening in Soda Club’s former location, will serve only fermented foods and wines aged at least ten years.

Brady has seen couples bring parents who have no idea they just ate a vegan meal. “Dessert is usually when people’s radars start going off,” he says. He was especially nervous serving cannoli to my dad. “It’s terrifying for me to serve anyone from the Bronx cannoli,” he said. But my dad said it was the best cannoli he’d ever had and wanted to know why. That’s when the jig was up. I think. It was a little loud in there, and he’s 85.

When the Overthrow owners opened their first restaurant, Avant Garden, in 2015, their marketing was all about being high-end vegan. “But over time, we started to see that people who didn’t know we were vegan just stumbled in. So we started to build our own universe,” he says. They stopped marketing their restaurants as vegan. Al Andalus is a Middle Eastern–inflected Spanish tapas bar. The words on the bistro windows outside Soda Club mention pasta, focaccia, pizza, raviolo, and tiramisu, but not veganism.

The main rule of the universe they created is that each dish must be conceived as if animal products never existed in the culinary world. That means no imitations of meat dishes. No Impossible anythings. Nothing is Beyond anything else. “We’re reframing guests’ expectations from ‘Is this as good as the original?’ to ‘Welcome to our universe,’” Brady says.

Soda Club is an Italian restaurant, not a vegan one. Which makes sense. It’s not as if when you live in a vegan house, your kid says, “What’s for dinner, Dad?” and he says, “Vegan!”

“Our thought is ‘Let the medium be the message,’” Brady says. “At Soda Club, pasta is the medium. These are the paints in our palette. You don’t get a pasta dish to get the meat. Back when I was eating meat, I would never get to the end of a pasta with rabbit and say, ‘The rabbit in that pasta was so good.’”

The universe also does not include a main course. “Traditional menus are organized with a protein hierarchy. Even in vegan restaurants, often with seitan. There’s so much protein talk that it’s kind of funny,” he says. Avant Garden’s menu is divided into Cold, Toasts, and Hot. “If you have a menu like that, people are going to be confused. And we like that. It opens the door wide open.”

If you don’t have to pick a main course, you’re not pondering what animal to eat. Instead, the restaurants hit you with a bunch of small, shareable plates, almost like a tasting menu experience. “It suggests abundance and exploration. That moves people away from the idea that they’re missing something. It’s eliminating any ingredient hierarchy,” he says.

Tara Punzone, the chef and owner of Pura Vita in L.A. and author of the new cookbook Vegana Italiana, has built a similar universe. “I intentionally don’t put the v-word anywhere. We’re an Italian restaurant. The fact that it’s vegan is secondary. Not to me, of course, but I don’t like to scare people off,” she says.

Staying low-key about veganism isn’t new. Punzone stopped eating meat when she was ten, and her mom quickly learned to stop telling her brother when there wasn’t meat in their dinners. He never noticed. Similarly, she figures that about 60 percent of Pura Vita diners don’t know it’s a vegan restaurant when they first sit down.

It helps that she, like Soda Club, makes Southern Italian food. “The menu is unchanged from what my grandmother made in Calabria. Pasta, potatoes, beans, vegetables—what they’d call peasant food. Lucky for me, they are both affordable and vegan,” Punzone says.

She does make fake vegan Parmesan that she sprinkles on pasta. But keep that quiet.

04 Nov 2025