The Absolute BEST Vegan Food in NYC (with Vegan Bodega Cat!) 🗽

Transcript

Alex Wolfe: What up! My name is Alex, and I want to welcome you to The Humane League's YouTube channel.

I also want to share a little bit about my experience shooting the "What I Ate" series New York City food tour that we shot back in January. We had such a blast going all over Manhattan and Brooklyn and trying some of the best vegan fare that New York City has to offer. Of course, we couldn't even begin to scratch the surface because New York, like many other cities, is growing and has so many incredible vegan options. Either full-on vegan restaurants or options at non-vegan restaurants, which Rebecca, my gal pal from Vegan Bodega Cat, shared about—she has a running list of many restaurants. She thought she would be out of work pretty quickly, but it turns out there are so many things to try. It was a blast, and of course, I was working with my dream team of Adam and José, and then our editor, Angel, who does an amazing job. So overall, if there's a city that you live in and you think that we should come visit, and you take us around and show you all the yummy vegan food, please let us know. Hope you enjoy. Thanks.

Hey, my name is Alex Wolf, and I'm the New York City Field Organizer for The Humane League. Today I'm gonna take you around and show you some of my favorite vegan spots to eat in New York City.

Brooklyn Whiskers is a vegan retail and wholesale-based shop here in, you guessed it, Brooklyn. They specialize in plant-based pastries and other unique delicious foods. So let's go take a look.

Michael Minahan: I'm Michael Minahan.

Preesa Bullington: And I'm Pressa Bullington.

Michael Minahan: Together we own Brooklyn Whiskers Bakery. We're a wholesale and retail all-vegan bakery café.

Preesa Bullington: We're artists, and this was a day job, and we sort of fell in love with it and fell in love with the community. So it was important to me to be able to introduce people in this area to just easy, nice vegan food that anyone can enjoy.

Alex Wolfe: Are you seeing this? Stop with the cuteness. I do declare that is the tastiest latte in town.

All right, so this is their Seattle burger. It's made from beets and peas, also on it is an espresso aioli with sriracha in it. And, let's eat... Wow, the thyme really comes through, and so does the espresso in the aioli sauce. It is perfect.

This is their Pesto Mutt sandwich on focaccia bread with walnut pesto and Cheezehound Mutzarella cheese, and it looks delicious. So I'm gonna eat some now. I love pesto so much. That is really good. I also love that they feature other vegan businesses here. So this is the Chuffle Cheese by Cheezehound. I'm gonna try it here with one of their bagel chips. If y'all decide to come in here, you've got to try their cheese plate. The cheeses are phenomenal.

Whoa, that was delicious, and now I'm gonna go get my sugar fix.

If you want to start your morning off with a sweet treat, you've got to head to Dun-Well Donuts. Dun-Well Donuts is an all-vegan donut shop with a list of 200 rotating varieties. They also serve ice cream and locally sourced French press coffee.

Okay, that's enough sweets for me for now. So let's head down to the Lower East Side to visit New York's premier vegan deli.

I just got to the Lower East Side at Orchard Grocer. Orchard Grocer is an all-vegan deli and food market inspired by the delicatessens of New York's past. They specialize in hearty sandwiches, homemade soft-serve, hard-to-find pantry items, and even harder-to-resist snacks.

Orchard Grocer is brought to you by the founders of MooShoes, a completely vegan shoe store that also sells non-leather bags and wallets and, conveniently, is attached to the grocery store.

With places like Orchard Grocer, being vegan in 2020 is so easy. I picked up some of my favorites here. I got my Just Mayo, my Good Catch Tuna. I'm also lucky enough to have the Hungry Wolfe Granola, which is my own personal granola brand, featured here on the shelves. So I picked some of that up. They also have an entire refrigerated section of vegan cheeses, which is just out of this world, blow-your-mind delicious. They have so many different flavors, and they're all here at Orchard Grocer.

So now we're in Bushwick, and we're heading to Hartbreakers, which is this like 1970s inspired fast-casual kind of vibe. If you're looking for a heartier kind of lunch, this is your go-to spot.

Kyle Amoroso: A lot of our customers come in, not vegan, and they are blown away by our food. I like to say we are Brooklyn's number one carnivore-approved restaurant. My personal favorite dish at Heartbreakers is the Picnic Basket. It's sweet and tangy and savory. It's a mess, so you need to be ready to not be looking cute. Maybe don't bring a first date, but it's the best.

Alex Wolfe: All right, so this is one of their most popular dishes. It is the Picnic Basket sandwich, and it's got fried chicken, cheddar, house-made bacon. Again, everything made here in-house. I'm so excited to try this. Wish me luck.

Dreams really do come true. Oh my god, that's the best thing I've had today. Wow, that's really good. Seriously, if you want to impress your non-vegan friends, I highly recommend this sandwich. This is the Dream On! salad, which looks unbelievable. You can really tell that everything is made in-house. It's so, so good.

This is the potato salad, and it has seeds in it, so it's health food, and I think it would go really, really well with that last Picnic Basket sandwich. So let's give this a try. I mean, it's potato salad, and it's amazing.

So that lunch was so epic between the burger and the potato salad, but if you're looking for something a little bit on the lighter side, I got you covered.

So when I'm in the mood for something a little lighter, I head on over to Beyond Sushi. With six locations throughout Manhattan, Beyond Sushi is hard to miss. They have an entirely vegan menu with items such as wraps, skewers, and of course, sushi rolls. Now, I'm going to go meet up with one of my favorite vegan Instagrammers.

Rebecca Doudak: Hey, my name is Rebecca. I run the account Vegan Bodega Cat. I got started because I was kind of a lonely vegan at first. For the first year of veganism, I didn't know anybody else that was vegan, even online. So then what I did was I followed the hashtag NYC vegan. Everyone that I followed in that first day of just like following random people, I know personally now. So it was just a huge milestone in a way where I realized one day, I said, I looked down, and I was like, wow, I'm friends with everyone I followed that one lonely day in my room.

I originally just started by trying to make a list of all the vegan restaurants I could find and reviewing the food there. And the more I listed, the more I found out, and I thought, I can make a complete list. Turns out there are hundreds of restaurants in New York City that either are vegan or serve vegan options. So here I am, it's been two years on Instagram and a year on YouTube, trying to keep up with all the new places. And every day, just a new place pops up, and I'm there eating the food. And that's how Vegan Bodega Cat started.

Alex Wolfe: What's the feedback that you're getting from people? I love your videos. Part of what I love so much is that you're so personable and so down-to-earth. So you're really relatable. So yeah.

Rebecca Doudak: I think one thing that applies to both platforms, Instagram and YouTube, is that I never really had the goal of having a perfect page or a perfect image. I kind of just wanted a place people can go to for information and to feel connected to somebody who's going through the same sort of things as them. The internet world is very saturated with perfect people, and people are kind of over it. So that's not where I wanted to go with my page. And then I started my YouTube channel last year in December. So it's been a year now, and over that year, I've gained 27,000 subscribers, and I think that's why.

Alex Wolfe: But like the food, tell us about the food. What is your favorite place? I mean, you're talking about all these hundreds of options. Could you possibly pick one or maybe two that are favorites of yours?

Rebecca Doudak: My top two right now have to be Petisco Vegano. They're a cafe/restaurant that went fully vegan a few months ago. I went there recently and was blown away. I eat a lot of foods, and it takes a lot to blow me away.

And I recently went to Jajaja, or hahaha, for the first time in a while, and they're still like the favorite of mine. But the nachos, please get the nachos.

Alex Wolfe: Obviously, you have a goal of sharing delicious vegan food with people so they know that it's out there. And thank you for that. But what else are you trying to accomplish with your messaging?

Rebecca Doudak: I like branching out to the non-vegan world, and I like showing people that veganism can be totally down to earth, right? We've passed the era of the snobby green juice vegan lifestyle. And we're at the point where, if you want to be a green juice vegan, you can do that. And if you want to be a fried chicken vegan, you can do that too. And it's all about incorporating your values into your lifestyle. It doesn't have to be one way. And that's why I show people restaurants on all different sides of the money spectrum, on all different sides of the health spectrum, so people can find what works for them.

Alex Wolfe: Becca you're the absolute best, and I'm so glad you're my new friend. Really I'm so grateful for this time that we've had together to talk. We are, next, heading to Cinnamon Snail. Is there anything there that you recommend that I should recommend to eat?

Rebecca Doudak: Totally. The sage seitan burger. It's a little messy, but it is so good, and they serve it on a warm pretzel bun. Honestly one of my favorite burgers. It's not very burger-y. It's more gourmet, because they put mac 'n' cheese on it. It's so good. That's what I recommend for sure.

Alex Wolfe: Thanks for the recommendation.

Rebecca Doudak: Yeah, no problem. That's what I'm here for.

Alex Wolfe: And we're off.

I just came from having a great chat with Becca from Vegan Bodega Cat. Now I'm here at Cinnamon Snail, which has a wide variety of offerings, including hearty sandwiches and an awesome full pastry case of delicious sweets in case you're in the mood for that.

One of the cool things about Cinnamon Snail is that they were the first all-vegan organic food truck, and now they've set their roost here in the heart of midtown Manhattan at Pennsy Food Hall. So I have so many incredible, yummy options in front of me right now.

This is on special, currently at Pennsy Food Hall, but it's a regular on the food truck. It is their Korean barbecue seitan with house-made kimchi in a chili-buttered tortilla, and I had a fork, but then he told me I was supposed to eat it with the tortillas. That is spicy and yummy.

Adam Sobel: Probably the most popular menu item here is the Beastmode Burger Deluxe, which has jalapeño mac and cheese and smoked chili coconut bacon and bourbon barbecue sauce on this ancho-chili-seitan hamburger. It gets arugula and chipotle mayo, and it's on a pretzel bun. That's quite popular.

Alex Wolfe: Perfection. So there are like 30, 40, a million different donut flavors. So I feel like you just got to come down and pick out whatever one speaks to you. They're all amazing. This is the Cookie Monster, and it spoke to me. There are obviously delicious vegan donuts all over New York City, but these are so unique, you just have to come and try them.

So when I'm looking for real vegan comfort food, I head on over to Rip's. Rip's has locations in both Brooklyn and lower Manhattan. They use plant-based proteins to create American classics we know and love today. I got the Unreal Coney Dog, and another New York staple, the chopped cheese. When you're here, you have to try their ice cream sundaes. This is seriously a place to impress your veg-curious friends.

Rip's will give you a massive lunch you will not regret. But I'm gonna dial it back just a bit here at Terms of Endearment. They offer delicious French-inspired small plates and also pastries, which we're gonna go try.

This is their monkey bread, which apparently is made from all of the excess dough from the croissants that they can't use, which I think is super awesome. The bottom tastes like sweet, bready croissant, and the top is a little bit crunchier and tastes kind of more like a cinnamon roll. It's really good.

This is their chocolate ganache tart with coconut, and it is just absolutely stunning. Like, what a work of art. I don't even want to eat it, but I'm going to. That tastes so fancy. Chocolate is not my thing normally, but wow, that is really good. I love coconut.

I'm definitely most excited for this one. This is a prosciutto and cheddar croissant, which I've never had. So let's see... Oh my gosh, it smells like ham. That's delicious. Oh my god, that is so good. I want like a hundred of them.

We just got back from Terms of Endearment. We've been having all of the best food all over New York, and yes, there's all this amazing food that we've gotten to explore, which is super great, and I'm so happy to share with you. But I wanted to pause and also talk a little bit about my work as the Field Organizer here in New York and why it's so important and why I am so grateful for my community of activists.

New York is full of all kinds of passionate people, and there's no shortage in the animal rights movement. I work directly with individuals who want to make a difference for the animals, especially farmed animals who don't have a voice. And the way that I help them in our new organizing model is I help empower them with the tools and resources to send powerful messages to big companies like McDonald's, for example, one of our flagship campaigns. At The Humane League focuses mostly on corporate campaigning. So this means that we get to affect the largest number of animals with policies to create better welfare for them.

So I feel personally really honored to be able to work with so many people who spend their time before work, after work, and on the weekends tirelessly working for the animals, dedicated to creating a world with much more peace and harmony. And one of the goals of this video, and I'm so grateful to be a part of it, is to help you make more compassionate food choices.

Now I'm in Manhattan at my go-to lunch spot, Marty's V Burger. Marty got his start at the 2014 New York City Vegetarian Food Festival, and he's since opened up a brick-and-mortar where he's gained quite the following because he has the most delicious burgers, drumsticks, cheese steaks, mac 'n' cheese, animal-style fries. I mean, the list goes on. The food is absolutely unbelievable.

Marty Krutolow: A lot of people come in here that don't know where to begin, so the first reaction we see is surprise that vegan food is not tree bark and leaves anymore. The vegans that come in here, "I haven't had a Big Mac in forever."

So one of our signature burgers is the Original World Famous, which is exactly the flavor profile of the, let's say, quintessential fast-food burger.

Alex Wolfe: So this is Marty's Double World Famous, which I can already vouch for, but I'm very excited. It's basically meant to mimic your old childhood, like he was saying, kind of fast-food burger dreams. It's the best burger in town. 100%.

These are their buffalo wings, and I got them with the blue cheese dressing. Oh yeah. As someone who lived in LA for ten years and couldn't enjoy the animal-style fries that I saw go by, I am so excited to have this option vegan here in New York.

So they also have a whole bunch of rotating shake options, all made in-house. This is the chocolate mint, and what I really love is that they have this giant compostable straw made from corn. I don't know how he does it, but he keeps the prices so reasonable, and is eco-conscious, which I love. It's like a thin mint but liquid and better.

Seasoned Vegan is one of the first full-service vegan restaurants in Harlem. They take from the typical Caribbean and American dishes and add a vegan, soulful twist. When I stop here, I always get the crawfish po-boy, which I'm pretty sure you're not gonna find anywhere else. And their lemon-crusted chicken nuggets are in a league of their own.

Whenever I'm in the mood for vegan Mexican food, which is pretty often, I definitely head to Jajaja. With locations in the Lower East Side, West Village, and Brooklyn, I can get my fix wherever. If you want to escape the city without actually leaving New York, this is the place for you. And with an extensive cocktail menu, it's also a great date spot.

I'm over in Brooklyn now at a Williamsburg staple, Vinny's Pizzeria. Vinny's has been serving the neighborhood since the 1960s, and their original recipes have not changed.

If you're looking for an old-school, traditional pizza shop, this is definitely it. You gotta come in. And just so you know, a third of their entire menu is vegan. They've got all these amazing pizza flavors, but then they also have baked ziti and lasagna and drumsticks and heroes and all kinds of stuff. So let's check it out.

So this is a plain cheese pizza with a spicy kind of vodka sauce, which I've never had before, and it's absolutely amazing. So this is the T.Hanks. I love the names of their pizzas here, but this is like a barbecue chicken and bacon kind of mozzarella pizza, and it's also really good. I like that they have options here. Even like a side of garlic knots for vegans eating out is such a plus.

We just scratched the surface of vegan options here in New York City. There are so many unbelievably unique and just innovative veg options throughout the whole city. Please do let me know your favorites in the comments below. And if you happen to want to get involved with THL, please click the link in the description.

Until next time!