Los Angeles
A Clean Plate
Veganism in LA
With over thirty unique vegan restaurants, Los Angeles has been ranked the second most vegan-friendly city in the nation. The city has the most listings on Happy Cow, a website that compiles vegan and vegan-compatible restaurants, as well as countless stores which boast vegan fabrics and cruelty-free testing. Here, Caravan explores two approaches to vegan restaurants in Los Angeles: Monty’s Good Burger and Sage Plant Bistro.
The Monty’s Good Burger in Echo Park has a line out the door and around the corner at lunchtime. Once inside the diner, you can hear the loud chatter of cooks in baseball caps, the ringing of bells signifying a completed order, and the sizzle of Impossible Burgers on the grill. For the uninitiated: Impossible Burgers use heme, the molecule which gives meat its distinct flavor, from soybeans to engineer a plant-based burger which is indistinguishable from the animal alternative. As the company’s website boasts, an Impossible Burger will use ninety-seven percent less land, eighty-seven percent less water, and eighty-nine percent less greenhouse gas emissions than a burger made from cows.
By combining this “meat” with plant-based oil, cheese, and condiments, Monty’s creates realistic single and double cheeseburgers as well as other fast food favorites for their customers to enjoy. When our order (three cheeseburgers, one vanilla milkshake, one rootbeer float, fries, and tater tots) is brought to the table, the smell is identical to that of food from roadside diners and small town restaurants. That is, it smells unhealthy. But as a completely plant-based restaurant, Monty’s delivers a filling meal without the guilt from the additional calories — or the environmental impact — from meat.
Yet Monty’s Good Burger does not shy away from the American aesthetics we associate with burger joints. We sit in red booths at metal-rimmed tables against a blue-and-white checkered wallpaper, and we are served our food in paper packaging, our drinks in plastic cups. Food waste and disposables are all thrown into one black trash can in the back. Fluorescent lights dot the ceiling, and we can see old vents and pipes in the ceiling. Move further back into the seating area, however, and a neon blue sign spells “MONTY’S” in monstrous writing, lighting up an otherwise dark alcove. The electric glow illuminates painted mugshots of famous “rebels” (those who are vegan), including celebrities such as Ellen Degeneres, Miley Cyrus, and Joaquin Phoenix. And so, in one well-packaged meal, Monty’s Good Burger calls on our nostalgia for traditional American eateries while simultaneously allowing us to feel rebellious for choosing a plant-based diet.
Chef Mollie Engelhart, the head chef and founder of Sage Plant Bistro, however, calls bullshit. When asked for her thoughts on the Impossible Burger, she laughs. “I said on Instagram what I really thought about the Impossible Burger, and people wanted to kill me,” Engelhart explains. She continues, “I don’t think supporting industrial agriculture, plant-based or meat-based, is a win,” Englehart says. “When I say that it’s not a win, I mean that for the whole — for animals, for people, for everything.”
Englehart’s vision for Sage Vegan Plant Bistro centers on regenerative agriculture, a set of farming practices which reverse climate change by rebuilding organic matter in topsoil. These actions, taken by Englehart’s family at their seventeen-acre farm in Fillmore, California, improves the surrounding ecosystems’ biodiversity and water retention. In addition to growing avocado, corn, eggplant, jalapeno, oranges, and lime for each restaurant location, Englehart’s Sow a Heart Farm transports pre-consumer food waste to process as compost and animal feed.
At the Sage Vegan Bistro in Culver City, upside-down tin buckets with exposed bulbs inside light up the bar, and farm tools line the walls surrounding tables set with rescued silverware — another one of Englehart’s efforts to improve the sustainability and closed-loop nature of the restaurant. The brunch menu, with prices that never exceed twenty dollars, includes American breakfast classics such as flapjacks and avocado toast, a host of Mexican dishes, and an assortment of pizzas. While discussing her pricing, Englehart speaks passionately about her food: “Organic beans and rice from multiple countries, local, organic avocados, pickled cabbage from my farm, jackfruit from the Philippines, cilantro and soy sauce from America — all of that came together in a burrito on your plate for seventeen dollars and you’re complaining? That burrito is a fucking miracle as far as I’m concerned.”
But Chef Mollie is not blind to her privilege in being able to serve and consume vegan food. She calls Los Angeles the “mecca of vegan food and privilege,” and she reveals that her household is actually vegetarian—a compromise for her Mexican husband, whose traditional meals often include fish and red meat. She tells us about the need for cultural sensitivity and, most importantly, allowing communities to thrive on subsistence farming. Instead of admonishing people who do not have completely plant-based diets, Englehart believes that anybody who tries to eat consciously — not only to reduce environmental impacts, but to support small-scale farming — and move towards regeneration is contributing to a better planet and society.
If you want to eat consciously but don’t know where to start, here are a few tips from Caravan:
Start small. Use a perfect substitute such as the Impossible Burger to break your habit of eating meat. Near campus, you can find the Impossible Burger at Bear’s Food Court.
Find other plant-based restaurants serving food from different cultures. Examples include Cha-Ya, a Japanese eatery on Northside, Long Life Vegi House, a Chinese restaurant downtown, and Guacamole 61, a taqueria which sources locally.
Compost your food waste. While dining halls make composting easy, it can be hard to collect and dispose of food waste in apartments. If you live in an apartment building with over five units, your landlord is required by law to provide composting services. Ask your landlord to comply with these standards, and consider purchasing your own composting kit to store in your kitchen.
Find local sources for your produce, such as the Downtown Berkeley Farmers’ Market which opens every Saturday.
Support movements such as Kiss the Ground, which spreads awareness of regenerative agriculture educates farmers and consumers about the potential of soil.
Words: Anjika Pai
Photos: Samhita Sen & Jane Huynh
