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Where did all the vegan restaurants go?

And what does it mean for the plant-based movement?

My favorite restaurant, here in Madison, Wisconsin, closed this week.

It was not my favorite because it had the greatest food I’d ever had, nor the most memorable ambiance. But I loved the Mad Rabbit Cafe because it had become my anchor in the neighborhood — it felt like home to me and a core group of friends as surely as the century-old houses lining the surrounding city blocks. Most importantly, it was entirely vegan — a rarity in this city, which, despite its ultra-progressive politics, embraces Wisconsin’s identity as “America’s Dairyland.” It was a refuge where my most closely held values found expression.

That closure is part of a national trend. US plant-based restaurants appear to be going through a contraction, amid the tumultuous aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic and, perhaps, an anti-plant-based cultural vibe shift.

VegNews magazine reported that data from HappyCow, an app that lists vegan and vegetarian restaurants, finds the number of vegan restaurants in three of the country’s top destinations for vegan dining — New York City, Los Angeles, and Portland, Oregon — decreased by between 21 and 25 percent from 2022 to late 2024. Those cities alone make up a significant share of America’s vegan restaurants. Then, in 2025 and 2026, some of the country’s most renowned, long-running plant-based restaurants also announced that they’d shut down: Modern Love and Candle in New York City, the Vegan Joint in LA, Millennium in Oakland, a more than three-decade-old institution (though it later reopened as a leaner operation), among many others.

According to a Vegan Society report, in October 2025, HappyCow (which is like Yelp but for plant-based dining) listed 1,717 all-vegan restaurants in the US. As of this writing, HappyCow lists 1,509.

Madison has never had anything like the vegan riches of New York or San Francisco, but even we are having our own vegan recession. When Mad Rabbit opened in early 2024, the city had four fully vegan restaurants; now, depending on how you count, one or two remain (and even the one that’s unambiguously vegan is a food-court-style stall). I visited Mad Rabbit at its last Sunday brunch, where it served what many people have described as the best tofu scramble they’ve ever had, and a crowd-pleasing rotation of crepe specials (this month, it was mango lassi). It’s a culinary niche that, once gone, is hard to replace in a mid-tier city like this one.

What vegan restaurants do you love — or miss?

We want to hear about the plant-based restaurants that have meant something to you — whether they’re still in business or dearly missed. Did they change your mind about vegan food, make you feel at home, or become part of your routine? What do you wish you could order one more time? Email me at marina@vox.com.

Mad Rabbit’s owner, Nate Anger, told me the business hadn’t been in particularly bad financial shape; it was profitable for each of the three years in which it operated, but not profitable enough to justify the punishing time commitment required to run it. Managing it had taken over his life, as it’s wont to do for many people in the food service industry. “I live here. I spend far more time here than anywhere else,” he told me in a recent interview at the restaurant. “I’ve missed my kids’ baseball game and tournaments and school band recitals.” I looked around at the oddball, DIY space he’d conjured — walls covered in houndstooth print, an Alice in Wonderland-like vortex, and art of rabbits in mischievous-looking moods, one brandishing a pair of large knives (the sort of room you wouldn’t want to encounter while stoned).

The animal rights movement has two very different emotional registers: the grief and terror of looking squarely at factory farming, and the joy of discovering how much creativity, abundance, and pleasure can exist outside it. All-vegan restaurants represent perhaps the fullest embodiment of that second feeling — like “a little heaven,” as Krupa Panchal, co-owner of Bombay Food Junkies, a vegan Indian spot in suburban St. Louis, put it to me.

Even as vegan businesses struggle to survive, plant-based options at non-vegan restaurants have become far more mainstream than they were a decade or two ago. Set against the stagnating (if not declining) share of Americans who identify as vegan or vegetarian, that raises difficult and even paradoxical questions for the animal movement.

For that reason, the mass die-off of plant-based restaurants has been much dissected and lamented in the vegan community. As I faced losing my own — a possibility I’d always feared and tried to forestall by supporting it as much as possible — the problem became much more visceral for me. I found myself thinking about why it mattered to me so much: What is lost when these places disappear, and what does that tell us about whether the plant-based movement can grow and endure?

I gave up meat and gained so much more

What vegan restaurants are for

The vegan restaurant predates the word “vegan” itself — and so, apparently, do questions about whether they can be financially viable. More than a century ago, French anarchist Georges Butaud co-founded the Foyer Végétalien in Paris, writing in a 1923 letter that he........

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