About

Who?

In order to be as clear as possible, we need to begin by saying who we are not. We have no affiliation whatsoever with the people at William Reed who produce “The 50 Best” lists and we regret if anyone felt even momentary confusion on this topic.

Unfortunately, maintaining anonymity is the only way to permanently preserve the long-term incorruptability of this annual project, but we can say that we were founded by two dear friends, the former owner of a vegan restaurant and a serial entrepreneur who is also a vegan organizer and activist. After several months, we expanded project input to a small circle of advisory co-founders before seeking broader input from our rather large circle of reviewers.

We can also say that no founders or voters currently own a vegan restaurant (or any other vegan business we intend to rank in the future).

But, while we can’t reveal our specific identities, we can 100% truthfully reveal that the “we” in this case are human beings and we can also permanently commit moving forward that all lists and all content and all artwork will always be created by actual human beings and never by artificial intelligence.

How?

The first and most important thing to say is that there has never been nor could there ever be an objectively true “best of” list. Furthermore, we want to say for the record that while we are proud of the human team we built (to reiterate, AI played no role whatsoever in the development of our selections or our content creation and will play no role in selections or content creation moving forward), we feel no need to anoint ourselves as the foremost authorities or the sole adjudicators on this topic. As such, this list, and all upcoming lists and articles, should be more properly considered “our favorites” or “the best we have personally tried”.

Now, with that having been said, the simple explanations for the two parts of “how” are as follows:

Methodology:

Our founders and reviewers nominated and ranked restaurants on a 100 point scale (criteria below) from their own personal dining experiences to be considered. We then contacted the restaurants to verify their acceptance of the nomination, and assembled the final list from the previously submitted rankings of the restaurants that accepted the nomination.

Criteria:

Flavor (up to 50 points), Sourcing (up to 10 points), Preparation (up to 10 points), Creativity (up to 10 points), Atmosphere (up to 10 points), Service (up to 10 points)

Why?

1. We think it’s a bunch of crap that the vast majority of the most prominent food, drink, event, and travel writers along with the major related publications either altogether ignore vegan restaurants (and other vegan community spaces and events) or engage in patronizing and phony tokenism, so we decided to create our own lists.
2. We want to encourage all people to frequent vegan restaurants (and cafes etc) more often because we want to see vegan community spaces thrive.
3. We hope our work reaches the global vegan community and convinces many vegans to increase in-person visits to vegan businesses or events even more than normal because: A) vegan community spaces and events are the “marketing front porches” of the veganism movement itself and when these places are full of happy customers having a good time those front porches instantly become exponentially more inviting and therefore more effective and B) vegan business owners represent the front line of the veganism movement, putting in many cases everything they have on the line, so they deserve our quite literal constant support to the extent possible.
4. We hope our work reaches as many non-vegans as possible and pushes them toward recognizing the reality that: A) around 95 out of the 100 things that give food amazing flavor are naturally vegan, like literally every single herb and every single spice and every single fruit and every single seed and so on, which of course accurately forecasts the simple truth that OF COURSE VEGAN FOOD CAN BE ABSOLUTELY SCRUMPTIOUS and B) regularly eating vegan meals, especially whole food vegan meals, improves physical health which facilitates both a higher quality of life and a longer life. In other words, we wish to convince non-vegans that flavor is vegan and being open-minded to vegan food is in their own self-interests.
5. We particularly would like to challenge non-vegan food “influencers” to be a little less “follow the leader” and a little more “leader”. To say the same thing another way, you really aren’t influencing anything at all when you boringly slobber all over the same places every other faux influencer has already covered, whereas by doing the one thing no other influencers are doing, which is covering vegan restaurants at least some of the time, you become an actual influencer which is supposed to be the whole point.
6. We want to encourage all vegan small business owners to focus primarily not on veganism itself but on creating phenomenal food and a memorably appealing atmosphere and experience. We feel like too many vegan small business owners think they are in the veganism business which is of course a movement not a business. The truth is that ALL restaurants, bars, cafes, and hotels are in the hospitality business, which necessarily means amazing food, delicious drinks, attentive and friendly service, and a pleasant environment. Focus on the hospitality first, and an indirect but highly effective veganism promotional campaign develops organically as happy customers spread the word to create future happy customers.

Email us at 50bestvegan@gmail.com.