From theguardian.com
Online abuse is latest challenge for plant-based eateries along with high costs and changing appetites
When Jim Anderson and his wife, Samantha, opened their vegan restaurant, the Oak Tree, in 2013, they boasted proudly of its plant-based menu. Not any more. The “V-word” has become such a target for abuse that they have removed it from their menu and social media.
“We block up to 10 people a day on social media,” said Anderson. “All we are is a restaurant that serves a type of cuisine. But for some reason, that word – the V-word – seems to cause people to go crazy, so we’ve dropped it.”
It may sound odd that anyone would be offended by chilli fried tofu or lightly battered cauliflower, but Anderson said the online abuse was relentless.
He said vegan restaurants had become a punching bag for culture war trolls who see them as a “threat to their way of life, like transgender rights and Black Lives Matter”.
Jim Anderson at his vegan restaurant, the Oak Tree, in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex. Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian
Alongside sky-high operating costs, the impact of the cost of living crisis and waning appetite for plant-only food, online attacks are the latest challenge facing Britain’s vegan restaurants.
Industry experts said they were at the sharpest end of a struggling hospitality sector after a series of venues either closed or started serving meat in order to stay open.
A cafe in Cheshire last month announced that it was having to put meat on the menu to avoid closure. Last year the vegan fast-food chain Oowee closed one of its sites in Dalston, east London, and said it would put meat on the menu at a number of other venues.
Neat Burger, backed by Leonardo DiCaprio and Lewis Hamilton, closed half of its London sites in December. In the same month VBites, the vegan business owned by Heather Mills, went into administration.
In the Essex town of Leigh-on-Sea, the Oak Tree was once one of five or six vegan bistros, Anderson said. “We’re now the only one. We’ve been here since 2013 and we’re still here banging the drum – quietly.”
Customers at the Oak Tree. Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian
He said if the Oak Tree had opened in 2018 or 2019, as many other plant-only restaurants did, they would “definitely not” have survived.
In one sense, the struggle is purely economic. Independent restaurants have been battered by the squeeze on living standards, with more than 10,000 closures since the pandemic – equivalent to one in 10 hospitality businesses.
Big chains such as Nando’s, Pizza Express, McDonald’s and Wagamama muscled in on the vegan market as it grew before Covid-19, leaving smaller venues competing for a slice of an already tiny pie.
But now a change in tastes and attitudes may be under way. Paul Askew, the chef patron and owner of restaurants the Art School and Barnacle in Liverpool, said he had seen a massive shift in eating habits since the start of the pandemic.
Demand for vegan and vegetarian food had plummeted, he said, while the number of people choosing pescatarian – fish and dairy but not meat – had risen by 15-20%.
“Potentially, people who were very strict vegan have reassessed things because Covid taught us that we’re here for a good time not a long time,” he said. “I think people have loosened their strict veganism and they are willing to dip into pescatarianism or the odd meat dish.”
Industry experts said veganism was undergoing the same phenomenon as organic food before the financial crash of 2008: in perilous economic times, people prioritise value for money over food that may be more ethical but more costly.
Helen Dewdney, the consumer expert better known as the Complaining Cow, said: “Many are looking to just reduce their meat intake and become part-time vegetarians or vegans, which in turn means that food outlets serving only a vegan menu are seeing fewer and fewer customers through the doors.”
Anderson conceded that the vegan boom had “levelled out”. “Veganism was very popular for a while but maybe when Covid started people’s priorities changed,” he said.
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