A crew of innovator chefs and entrepreneurs have turned DC into a hub of vegan dining. But they have all kinds of competing ideas about what meat-free fare should be.
Margaux Riccio, starting in on the unlikely story of how she came to be the vegan co-owner of one of the buzziest new plant-only restaurants in Washington—and also the nemesis of a lot of people who would be her natural customers.Riccio grew up around her father’s California steakhouse, among a big meat-eating Italian family. She started cooking at the Atlas Room on H Street, Northeast, in 2010, but two years later she was forced to quit the kitchen, stricken with hives and mysterious allergies.
It sounds simple, but picture the average restaurant menu: Even now, in our supposedly veg-friendly culture, vegan offerings are typically tucked into a corner like afterthoughts. Not only that, but Riccio’s non-meat options were wild replicas of the real thing. Vegan diners would pepper Pow Pow staff with questions about the food—how had they converted chickpeas into such a delicious simulacrum of pork? But Riccio refused to emerge from the kitchen to talk it up.
So Sharkey asked Riccio to secretly whip up a completely meatless and dairy-free version of Pow Pow’s summer menu for a meeting of the owners. “At the end of the meeting, he says, ‘What do you think of the new meats and cheeses?’ ” recalls Riccio. “Our partners said, ‘It’s great, it’s great,’ ” at which point Sharkey copped to the ruse. “He tricked them.”
But here’s the thing: Amid all her success, she still can’t bring herself to identify as vegan. And there’s a whole tribe of plant-only diners who look at chefs like her and instead of seeing triumph—more people for the cause!—they see sellouts, people who cater to animal-eaters, even in fake form. “Vegans hate me,” Riccio says, and laughs.long history with the cuisine.
But not shockingly for anyone who followed the fights between Big Beer and its upstart craft rivals, to take one example, as the vegan scene has blown up, so have all kinds of ideological factions and stylistic clashes among its faithful. Marketing exec Jonah Goldman and celebrity chef Spike Mendelsohn are on a quest to make their PLNT Burger chain a sort of Vegan Burger King.
Unless you’re in the crowd who can’t stomach the thought of a vegan industrial complex. “His business model seems like McDonald’s,” says Riccio. “We’re never going to beat their prices.” From a purely economic standpoint, it all makes sense. But there’s a card-carrying class of purists—Vegan People, as Riccio thinks of them—who’d be less than psyched about a chef who made his name in red meat now authoring and benefiting from a change for the social good .
Raised on the veggie-forward cooking of his native Israel, Nussbacher came to the US to study at Brown. In 2008, he arrived in Washington to work for Opower, part of a young crew who turned the software firm into one of the area’s hottest tech companies. The firm set out to convince people to lower their energy consumption through gentle prodding, such as usage reports adorned with smiley faces when they consumed less than their neighbors; in 2016 it sold to Oracle for $532 million.
Shouk’s mushroom shawarma: The restaurant isn’t into trying to disguise plant-based food as some meat-lover’s vegan dream. For fun, I called PETA for its take on Vegan vs. Vegan, thinking the hard-line organization devoted to the ethical treatment of animals probably held a hard line on the issue. Nope. “Make it in the shape of a whole chicken or suckling pig, for all I care,” Ingrid Newkirk, president of the Dupont Circle–based group, told me. But the message was not exactly unified.
Cheers had grown up in Prince George’s County, graduated from Morgan State University, and spent his early adult years trying to make it as an entrepreneur, having both a house and a car repossessed. For decades, he’d watched his mother help manage her lupus by eating a vegan diet but struggle to find foods she liked.
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