Posted on
February 04, 2022 by
The VRG Blog Editor
Photo from The Sweets Geek
The Vegetarian Resource Group maintains an online Guide to
Vegan/Vegetarian Restaurants in the USA
and Canada.
Here are some recent vegan restaurant additions. The entire guide can be found
here: http://www.vrg.org/restaurant/index.php
To support the updating of this online restaurant guide,
please donate at: www.vrg.org/donate
Here are some new additions to VRG’s guide (Note: Due to
the COVID-19 pandemic many are doing take-out
and/or delivery now):
Animal Liberation Kitchen serves PB Choco banana
croissant, croissant plain, shitake gyro, JustEgg patty, basil feta croissant
sandwiches, and more.
Roots
Vegan Kitchen, Delray Beach Market, 33 SE 3rd Ave., Delray Beach, FL 33483
For breakfast try their pancakes, overnight oats, coconut
chia pudding, and glory morning muffin. For lunch and dinner enjoy roasted
vegetable warm salad, buffalo cauliflower, hearts of palms tacos, veggie
tamales, jackfruit reuben, and much more.
Stache
West Hollywood, 8941 Santa Monica Blvd., West Hollywood, CA 90069
Following its mission of being a hub for the queer
community — an “all-inclusive social house for every form of self-expression”
and “safe and fun place for all to continue to grow, connect and thrive” — this
bar, nightclub, and restaurant has a packed schedule of events like drag brunch
and drink-and-draw, in décor honoring the underground spaces of queer history —
an industrial warehouse with historic lgbtq images and murals by local artists.
The food is all vegan and includes a regular menu with burgers, wings, tacos,
burritos etc. (don’t miss the banh mi fries!) and a special weekend brunch menu
with pancakes, breakfast scramble etc.
Take-Two
Café, 433 State St., Schenectady, NY 12305
Whether you need a cheerful start to your day or something
hearty to fill your belly in the afternoon, Take-Two Café offers delicious,
locally and ethically sourced meals and coffee in a relaxing environment.
Favorites include the avo smash – avocado, pesto, feta, cucumbers, and walnuts
on toasted bread – and the Buffalo crane wrap – loaded with buffalo seitan,
buffalo ranch, lettuce, tomato, shredded carrots, and cheese sauce on a crunchy
tostada and wrapped in a flour tortilla, all grilled to perfection with
homemade salsa on the side. Not too hungry but desperate for an energy boost?
Choose from an assortment of teas, coffees, lattes, and iced drinks of your
liking. Take-Two encourages all people – whether vegan or not – to enjoy a
taste of fresh, plant-based cuisine.
The
Sweets Geek, 4050 Erie St., Willoughby, OH 44094
The Sweets Geek is a cake shop where you can indulge in a
delectable dessert. Strawberry balsamic crispy cake, pumpkin rolls, buttercream
and cookies, pastries, and other bites are on the menu.
Vegan Fried Chick’un, 2961 W. Broadway, Vancouver, BC V6K 2G9, Canada
Chick’un nuggets, hot crispy
chick’un burger, yam fries, chick’un tenders, and more are available.
Simple take-out window in
downtown Vancouver specializing in all-vegan custard pudding — a smooth, creamy
treat made from kabocha squash, coconut milk and maple syrup. All ingredients
are organic and vegan, and free of white sugar nuts and soy. Flavors include
vanilla and caramel, matcha green tea, chocolate, sesame etc. They also do a
soy pudding and vegan crème brûlée, and offer a kit to make your own pudding at
home, and their products can be found in numerous restaurants and grocery
stores.
Wild Thing, 1477 NE Alberta St. #100, Portland, OR 97211
Wild Thing is a plant-based
café serving vegetable bowls, smoothies, and natural wine. Everything is local,
seasonal, and organic. The build-your-own-bowl menu offers a choice of a base
(grains and greens), vegetable toppings, sauces, and crunchy toppings. Vegan proteins can also be added to the
salad. Signature bowls are also on the menu including the Wild One bowl with
greens, lemony Brussels sprouts, green tahini miso and coconut garlic sauces,
and Wild Spice. Smoothies are also available such as the maca mocha smoothie
made with locally roasted coffee. Their menu also includes house-canned wines
made from locally grown grapes.
Posted on
February 04, 2022 by
The VRG Blog Editor
Recent topics brought up
include:
– A parent asked: Can you recommend any vegan pamphlets designed for kids – for those who would be learning about veganism? We recommended looking here: https://www.vrg.org/family/kidsindex.htm
– Do You Know a Vegan High School Student Willing to Share
What They Eat in A Day? Goodful is looking to cast a vegan high school student to
show what they eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/VRGparentsandkids is intended to be a group that offers support for families raising children on vegan diets and for vegan kids around the world. We envision it as a place to get advice about a wide-variety of topics: pregnancy, birthday parties, school lunches, Halloween, non-leather apparel, cruelty-free products, summer camps, and more. Please use it as a place to share your wisdom, seek advice, or just find a sympathetic ear. The goal is to offer support.
Consequently, any profane, defamatory, offensive, or violent language will be removed. Feel free to disagree, but do so respectfully. Hateful or discriminatory comments regarding race, ethnicity, religion, gender, disability, sexual orientation, or political beliefs will not be tolerated. We expect that posts should relate to vegan diets and lifestyles. The Vegetarian Resource Group reserves the right to monitor all content and ban any user who posts in violation of the above rules, any law or regulation, SPAM, or anything otherwise off topic.
Please share this information
with any veggie families that you know! Thanks.
Posted on
February 03, 2022 by
The VRG Blog Editor
By Reed Mangels, PhD, RD
A Vegetarian Resource Group member wrote to us with concerns
about getting enough protein because they weren’t able to tolerate more than
half a cup of beans a day. They had heard that older adults need more protein.
There is reliable research that suggests that older adults
need slightly more protein than younger adults do. A somewhat higher protein
intake, especially when combined with resistance training can build muscle in
older adults. This increased muscle can help to offset the muscle loss that is
a part of the aging process. Muscle loss can increase the risk of falls and
keep older people from doing the tasks they’d like to do.
How much more protein are we suggesting? Get out your
calculator! It seems like between 0.36 and 0.57
grams of protein per pound of body weight along with resistance training can
lead to a larger muscle mass in older people (1). In practical terms, if you weigh 120 pounds,
these recommendations would suggest that you get 43 to 68 grams of protein a
day; for someone weighing 150 pounds the recommendations suggest 54 to 86 grams
of protein. You can use this helpful
table to see how much
protein is in many vegan foods (scroll down to table 2).
Some experts
(2,3) suggest that spreading out protein over the entire day, instead of eating
one or two higher protein meals may further support muscle building. So, for
example, if you calculated that you needed 86 grams of protein per day, you
might try to eat around 30 grams of protein at each of 3 meals.
Here are some
sample meals that have around 30 grams of protein and don’t rely heavily on
beans since the person who originally asked the question didn’t want bean-heavy
meals.
A toasted bagel
with 2 Tablespoons of soy nut butter with 8 ounces of pea protein milk and a
banana
Strawberry
Smoothie made with 8 ounces of oat milk,
2 scoops of rice protein powder, a Tablespoon of nut butter, and ½ cup
of strawberries
Scrambled tofu
with toast: 6 ounces of extra firm tofu
scrambled with half a cup each of onions and peppers, and 2 Tablespoons of nutritional yeast; 2
slices of whole grain toast
2 burritos made
with ½ cup of cooked lentils, 1 cup of cooked quinoa and 1 cup of steamed chopped
broccoli
Veggie burger on
a bun with a cup of sweet potato oven
fries, peas and a cup of steamed green peas
Chili made with ½
cup of prepared TVP and ½ cup of beans served over 1 cup of cooked quinoa; and
a corn muffin
Stir-fry with 3 ounces
of sautéed seitan strips, ½ cup each cauliflower and carrots, and 3 Tablespoons
of slivered almonds served over 3/4 cup of cooked brown rice
Tempeh (¾ cup) in
barbecue sauce served over a medium baked potato with 1 cup of sautéed collards
Tofu in peanut
sauce (6 ounces of extra-firm tofu and 3 Tablespoons of peanut sauce) mixed
with a cup of steamed kale and served over ¾ cup of whole-wheat pasta
Of course, you
may need more (or less) protein than in these examples and don’t want to always
calculate the protein content of every meal. You can simply try to eat
concentrated protein sources such as soy products, seitan, beans, quinoa, nuts,
and nut butters throughout the day.
To learn more
about nutrition and other issues for older adults see Resources for Seniors
References
1. Haub MD, Wells AM, Tarnopolsky MA, Campbell WW. Effect of
protein source on resistive-training-induced changes in body composition and
muscle size in older men. Am J Clin Nutr.
2002; 76(3): 511–517.
2. Farsijani S, Morais JA, Payette H, et al.
Relation between mealtime distribution of protein intake and lean mass loss in
free-living older adults of the NuAge study. Am J Clin Nutr 2016;104:694–703.
3. Farsijani S, Payette H, Morais JA, et al. Even
mealtime distribution of protein intake is associated with greater muscle strength,
but not with 3-y physical function decline, in freeliving older adults: the
Quebec Longitudinal Study on Nutrition as a Determinant of Successful Aging
(NuAge study). Am J Clin Nutr 2017; 106:113–24.
Posted on
February 02, 2022 by
The VRG Blog Editor
By Ruby Sturm
I’ve been vegetarian my whole life and vegan for
about a year. I had only been a vegan for a few months when I entered The
Vegetarian Resource Group video contest with my video, “Eat for the Earth.” I
was so surprised when I won and Charles Stahler offered me an internship. I was
only in 7th grade at the time and didn’t realize I could be an intern, so I was
extremely excited by the offer and immediately said “yes.”
When I started the internship, I realized it was
going to be challenging. I received a large packet of VRG articles to read
as background preparation before my internship started. I also had to plan out
a schedule for the year. Planning your own schedule is actually very helpful,
because you are able to choose how much work you want to take on, and also what
you’d like to do. It’s been a lot of fun choosing things I’d like to work on,
such as vegan cooking, writing, researching, vegan product reviews, and even
photography. It feels like I’ve learned a lot during the first half of my
internship. This even includes basic things, such as how to make an email sound
“fancy.”
I worked on database entries for the VRG online restaurant
guide. (See: https://www.vrg.org/restaurant/index.php) It was interesting to
learn about vegetarian and vegan restaurants around the country, but the
restaurant websites didn’t always give enough information. I enjoy
researching and writing but there was something intimidating about the idea of
calling restaurants on the phone. I guess I’m more of a writer than a reporter.
But I did do several database entries, so I’m proud about that. In the Spring,
I will take on the different task of writing a book review of Making Vegan
Meats, by Mark Thompson (one of my favorite vegan YouTube chefs!).
So far, one project I’ve had a lot of fun with
has been writing an article about living as a vegan during my recent trip to
Germany (my dad’s from Germany, so we go there to visit the family every year).
What surprised me the most was to see how the large German grocery store chains
were competing (with magazine and billboard ads) to have the most vegan and
vegetarian products. Germany is a very meat, cheese, and yogurt loving country,
so the amount of vegan Brot-Belag they had was tremendous. Knowing in advance
that I was going to write an article really helped me remember details about
that trip more than a lot of other vacations.
It has also been a lot of fun to test vegan
recipes for Rissa, Senior Editor of VRG’s magazine. Some recipes were
straightforward. For example, when you put broccoli in an air fryer … it
gets crunchy! With other recipes, like the breaded vegan Cajun chicken, it was
surprising and almost magical to see how the food turned from doughy blobs into
having a really chicken-y texture. I definitely want to test more vegan recipes
in the future, and someday also write a few of my own.
Writing product reviews for Veggie Bits was also
one of my favorite assignments. I got to test out some tasty snacks and write
some honest opinions about them. One of the things I tested was chocolate
bars. It was incredible that they even had plant-based caramel in them. I
also tested Rio Good Che-easy Bread mix. When I baked it, it came out very
gooey on the inside and crunchy on the outside. Usually when I eat food I don’t
think too much about it, I just decide whether it tastes good or not. Reviewing
for Veggie Bits helped me to really think about what I was eating … and enjoy
the flavor a bit more.
With Love Plant Based is a great vegan
restaurant in my area that I got to review. The food there was delicious and
getting to do a write-up on this restaurant was incredible, I’d only been there
once before, but it felt like a restaurant that needed to be written about. So
I was excited when I got the chance to. Sadly, you couldn’t eat inside! Due to
Covid they were only doing pickup and outdoor dining. The outdoor dining was
next to a main road, which was not the most convenient spot. So I took the food
home and it was delicious. Another new challenge was taking food
photographs for my review. The broccoli chedd’a soup I ordered tasted delicious,
but it was hard to take a photo that caught the flavor for the reader. I had to
take about 30 pictures of the soup before it finally looked as good as it
tasted.
In the second half of my internship I look
forward to writing an article on vegan thrift store fashion and also doing some
research and writing about vegetarian dog foods, on a quest to finally convert
my very picky dog to vegetarianism. I may end researching and writing about
other things. Whatever they are, I’m sure it’ll be an adventure!
Posted on
February 01, 2022 by
The VRG Blog Editor
Photo from SCEN
The Vegetarian Resource Group maintains an online Guide to
Vegan/Vegetarian Restaurants in the USA
and Canada.
Here are some recent vegan restaurant additions. The entire guide can be found
here: http://www.vrg.org/restaurant/index.php
To support the updating of this online
restaurant guide, please donate at: www.vrg.org/donate
Here are some new additions to VRG’s
guide (Note: Due to the COVID-19
pandemic many are doing take-out and/or delivery now):
Bad Apple Vegan Restaurant and Bar, 2481 E. Hastings St.,
Vancouver, BC V5K 1Y8 Canada
They provide gluten-free options and
Daily Specials. Appetizers include corn dogs, nachos and they’re known for
their cauliflower wings with a myriad of flavors and dips to choose from. For
entrees, choose from hot dogs, burgers, salads, and sandwiches like the clever
Fig Easy featuring roasted cashew breaded seitan with fig and apple jam. You
might spice up your day with their house-made Bad Apple hot sauce. To tempt
your sweet tooth, there’s a chocolate brownie with ice cream, chocolate sauce
and cocoa. Their weekend brunch menu includes burritos and waffles, Mimosas and
a few other cocktails. Many dishes showcase tofu, mushrooms and vegan cheeses,
accompanied by intriguing sounding ingredients like jalapeno mango slaw and
pickled onions with red wine jam. The atmosphere is described as laid back,
often lively. Depending on the day, there may be Trivia or Pop Punk Bingo with
music and prizes.
Cham Cham, 605 W. 5th Ave., Vancouver, BC V6J 1N5 Canada
Offers caramelized chick’n wings
w/sticky rice, Hanoi crispy rolls with vermicelli noodles, vegetable pho noodle
soup, pomelo salad, fresh rolls, and more.
Dead Beet Eats, 312 Armour Rd., North Kansas City, MO 64116
For all our vegan junkies out there,
Dead Beet Eats is the perfect stop for you! Looking for a hearty and wholesome
dinner? Try their special Philly Cheese Burger or “Freak on a Leash”
hot dog. For fries lovers, check out the “Freaky Fries” – made with
vegan nacho cheese, spicy chipotle corn, crushed tacos, creamy garlic sauce,
chives, and tortilla strips. And for those a little more adventurous with a
sweet tooth, indulge in their “Compost Cookies”, packed with
everything from chocolate and marshmallows to potato chips and pretzels. No
matter who you are, Dead Beets had something for everyone! Gluten-free options
are available.
Dough House Vegan Donuts, 601 W. State St., Ste. 3, Black
Mountain, NC 28711
Serving sweet new vegan treats, the
owners of The Trashy Vegan Food Truck in West Asheville have opened The Dough
House offering chocolate, strawberry and glazed donuts plus a daily special.
Coffee and lattes are also available.
Pizzeria Du, 536 Queen St. W., Toronto, ON M5V 2B5 Canada
Pizzeria Du serves BBQ Jackfruit,
Canadian deluxe, margherita, and meatball sub pizzas. Also offers groceries
such as flour, almond parmesan, yeast, pizza kits, and more.
SCEN, NoMad, 1165 Broadway, New York, NY 10001
The name SCEN means “stage” in Swedish
and is pronounced “Zen.” The name embodies the fusion of Scandinavian
functionality with an ancient Japanese philosophy of conservation and
sustainability. Max, the founder, sees Scen as “…a theater for the balance between
humans and nature.” Flavored by a union of science and technology, heart and
art, the Scen team includes nutritionists to create dishes that are nutrient
dense, sweetened only with dates, gluten-free and healthy for people and our
planet. Scen partners with local farmers and strives to be a certified
zero-waste restaurant. Build your own savory bowl choosing from a rainbow of
sauces such as Cashew Kimchi, Beetroot Hummus and more. Add texture with sumac
or Pecan Dukkha. True to New York City spirit, they offer bagels too. Squash
Bagels tempt the palate with Macadamia Ricotta, as do Cream Cheese bagels with
Carrot Lox. If you prefer your veggies in a colorful edible tableau, consider
Instagram worthy vegan sushi rolls. After enjoying a healthy meal, maybe seal
the deal with a sweet bowl like chia cacao and more, customizing layers of
seasonal fruits and nuts, cacao nibs and other enticing possibilities.
The Social Gardener Café, Riverdale Hub, 1326 Gerrard St.
E., Toronto, ON M4L 1Z1 Canada
Housed in the Riverdale Hub, a
community center in the east end of Toronto, which also has event spaces, an
art gallery, an artisan market, and an all-vegan, locally-sourced pantry with
staple items, house made ferments etc.
Some ingredients for the pantry and café are grown on the Riverdale Hub
roof and others are as local and organic as possible. Come to the café for
baked goods with tea, coffee or smoothies (with different plant-based milk
options), or for more substantial food—ranging from STUSH Jamaican Patties with
a choice of fillings, to a full Maple Tahini Harvest Bowl. Gluten friendly, nut
friendly and soy friendly options are clearly marked and all proceeds go to
social initiatives. The café also has a
free seed library to encourage planting your own vegetables, flowers and herbs,
and the space can be rented for after-hours film screenings, art classes etc.
Breakfast, lunch, brunch, dinner, or an anytime snack! This simple recipe by
Leslie Gray Street will come together in a snap and please any crowd. Toss
together chopped vegetables like mushrooms, Brussels sprouts and red onion,
with shredded hash brown, and flavor with smooth cashew cream and salsa.
Everything goes on one sheet pan and after 25 minutes in the oven, your meal is
ready to garnish and enjoy! Easy enough for a late night snack. Tasty enough to
serve to brunch guests.
The Vegetarian Resource Group (VRG) is a non-profit organization dedicated to educating the public on veganism and the interrelated issues of health, nutrition, ecology, ethics, and world hunger. We have been helping health professionals, food services, businesses, educators, students, vegans, and vegetarians since 1982. In addition to publishing the Vegan Journal, VRG produces and sells a number of books.
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