The Plant-Based Hype Faded. The Food Stayed.

What the wave of vegan restaurant closures actually tells us about where plant-based food is heading

Photo by Sean Bernstein on Unsplash

Rachel Sugar’s recent New York Magazine piece, “How Veganism Got Cooked,” is one of the better pieces I’ve read on this subject. It’s thoroughly reported, genuinely curious, and resists the easy takes in both directions. She talks to chefs and restaurateurs who are struggling, and she lets them be honest about what’s hard. The closures are real: Modern Love, Cadence, Eleven Madison Park returning to meat. The hype has faded. VC money has dried up. Plant-based meat sales are down, and the cultural mood has shifted hard toward protein, animal fats, and skepticism of anything that sounds like it came out of a lab. I was quoted in the piece, and it got me thinking about how to frame what's actually happening.

I’ve been writing about this shift for a while now. By the end, Sugar actually arrives at something close to where I land: plant-based food hasn’t disappeared so much as it has spread into the mainstream. But the headline tells a different story, and headlines are what most people remember. “How Veganism Got Cooked” suggests a movement that failed. I’d argue it’s a movement that matured.

It’s worth distinguishing between two related but separate stories here. The plant-based product boom, the Beyond and Impossible era fueled by Silicon Valley money and promises of replacing animal agriculture by 2035, that has genuinely stalled. Sales are down, companies are restructuring, and the “ultra-processed” backlash has hit hard. But the dining story is different. Restaurants aren’t startups chasing scale. They’re culture, and culture moves in patterns that look like failure right before they become permanent.

What looks like collapse is actually something more interesting: diffusion. The plant-based restaurants that defined an era are closing, yes. But plant-based food itself has quietly spread into places it never existed before. The hype is gone. The food stayed. That distinction matters if you’re trying to understand where this is actually heading.

From Subculture to Mainstream: Three Phases of Plant-Based Dining

When I prepared for my interview with Sugar, I sketched out a framework I’ve been thinking about for a while. Plant-based dining in New York has moved through three distinct phases, and understanding them helps explain why this moment feels like an ending when it’s actually a transition.

The first phase, roughly from the 1990s through the early 2010s, was about identity and subculture. This was the era of Angelica Kitchen, Candle Cafe, and Pure Food and Wine. These restaurants weren’t trying to convert the masses. They were building community for people who already saw food as tied to ethics, spirituality, or politics. You went to these places because of who you were, not just what you wanted to eat. They carried the full cultural meaning of plant-based food at a time when almost nowhere else did.

The second phase was the trend boom, running from the mid-2010s through about 2021. Documentaries like Cowspiracy and The Game Changers reached mainstream audiences. Celebrities announced their plant-based journeys on social media. Impossible and Beyond entered fast food menus. Venture capital flooded into the space. Plant-based became a consumer category, and that’s when we saw the explosion of fast-casual concepts: By Chloe, Marty’s V Burger, Neat Burger, and dozens of others. The problem was that they all started to look and taste remarkably similar. Same patties, same sauces, same bowls, same brand voice. Novelty was driving demand, not cuisine, and novelty has a shelf life.

The third phase is where we are now: maturation. The correction has happened. The restaurants built on hype have largely closed, and what remains are places with actual culinary identity. Dirt Candy, Superiority Burger, Ras Plant Based, HAAM Caribbean Plant Cuisine, Spicy Moon. You don’t go to these restaurants because they’re vegan. You go because the food is genuinely good and rooted in a specific point of view.

Here's the part that doesn't make for a dramatic headline: plant-based options have quietly shown up everywhere else. Not all of these dishes are vegan, and that's exactly the point. The vegetable section of most restaurant menus used to be an afterthought. Now it's often the most interesting part. Now at Via Carota, it's the biggest section. At Gramercy Tavern, Michael Anthony built his reputation on it and literally wrote the book. At Dhamaka, the roasted cauliflower and jackfruit biryani hold their own alongside a meat-heavy regional Indian menu. The real victory is that plant-based food stopped being a category and became a capability that restaurants across the spectrum now exercise as a matter of course.

The Pattern Behind the Shift

This pattern isn’t unique to food. Cultural theorists from Dick Hebdige (Subculture: The Meaning of Style) to Sarah Thornton (Club Cultures) have documented it for decades: counterculture starts in identity spaces, gets commercialized in a trend phase, faces backlash, and then stabilizes as everyday culture once the hype fades. The meaning doesn’t disappear. It dissolves into the mainstream.

Hip-hop followed this exact arc. So did punk’s influence on fashion, yoga’s journey from spiritual practice to fitness staple, and craft beer’s evolution from niche obsession to standard bar offering. First there’s subcultural capital and insider knowledge. Then mainstream spectacle and rapid commercialization. Then the shakeout and cries that “it’s over.” And finally, it just becomes part of how we live. You don’t announce that you listen to hip-hop anymore. It’s simply music. You don’t declare yourself “a yoga person” to take a class. It’s just exercise.

Plant-based eating is in that final stage now. You don’t need to identify as vegan to eat plant-forward. The behavior stayed even as the identity requirement faded. That’s not decline; that’s cultural integration.

Beyond the Identity Trap

This is why I’ve grown skeptical of the identity framing altogether. The language of “vegan” and “plant-based” and even “flexitarian” keeps the conversation trapped in dietary tribalism. It asks people to declare who they are before they decide what to eat. But most people don’t want a food identity. They just want dinner.

Maybe that’s what Sugar’s headline actually got right. “How Veganism Got Cooked” reads like an obituary, but perhaps the thing that’s dying is the “ism” itself, not the food. The ideology, the identity, the tribal signaling. If that’s what’s being cooked, good. It was always getting in the way.

The real opportunity isn’t converting omnivores into vegans. It’s making the better choice the easier choice, regardless of what anyone calls themselves. I wrote more about this shift in thinking here, in the context of my work with Crossover Meats.

What the Next Era Looks Like

If the trend phase is over, what comes next? I don’t think we’re heading toward another wave of plant-based restaurant openings. I think we’re heading toward quieter integration, plant-based options showing up in the places where people already eat without asking anyone to change their identity or join a movement. Bodegas, school lunches, hospital cafeterias, workplace dining. That’s why I started Plantega, to put plant-based options into the corner stores where New Yorkers already shop. Culture tends to change at the point of convenience, not aspiration.

The Durable Phase

The goal was never to create more vegan restaurants. The goal was to make plant-based food part of everyday life, and that has already happened in ways that the closing-restaurant narrative obscures.

Meat isn’t going anywhere. Americans are eating more of it than ever. But this was never just about giving plants a seat at the table as a lifestyle option. The food system needs to shift toward less resource-intensive foods, and that shift happens faster when plant-based options are delicious, accessible, and normal, not when they require people to join a movement or adopt an identity. That’s progress, even if it doesn’t look like a revolution.

This is largely a New York story for now, but New York has a way of setting the template. What happens here tends to ripple outward, just as farm-to-table, craft cocktails, and third-wave coffee did before.

The product companies will have to figure out how to exist in this new world. The hype that launched Beyond and Impossible isn’t coming back. But if they can let go of the replacement narrative and focus on showing up where people already eat, there’s still a path forward.

Plant-based eating didn’t collapse. It matured. It became ordinary, and ordinary is durable in a way that trendy never is. The hype phase required you to seek out plant-based food and declare your allegiance to it. The mature phase just asks you to notice that it’s already there.

That’s not a story of decline. That’s the story of how real change happens.