I found out that Manna had gone in the saddest way possible: standing outside it. The oldest vegan restaurant in Europe, feeding Primrose Hill since 1966, and there I was on Erskine Road squinting at a notice in the window about the forfeiture of a lease. Sixty years of nut roasts, vegan sausage and mash, and organic wine, ended by a landlord’s paperwork. It felt like arriving at a friend’s house to find a sold board bending in the breeze.
Manna was not alone. Wulf & Lamb, whose Chelsea dining room had convinced me that a seitan burger could be an occasion rather than an apology, has vanished so completely that a search for it online turns up little more than the words Permanently Closed and a chorus of confused pilates queens. Farmacy in Notting Hill, all earth bowls and candlelight, followed in January last year. If you kept a scrapbook of London’s plant-based scene circa 2019, it now reads like a war memorial. The one I most mourn is Cafe Van Gogh, a social enterprise nestled beside a church in Brixton that served amazing food and employed staff with learning disabilities to help them gain skills in hospitality.
The autopsy, in every case, returns the same verdict. Rents that climb faster than any small restaurant’s takings possibly could. Business rates that treat a 40-cover neighbourhood dining room the same as a flagship for a private-equity-backed chain. Energy bills that turned profitable kitchens into loss-makers overnight. Unity Diner said as much in its farewell post, noting that restaurant insolvencies were at their highest level in over a decade (though it has subsequently re-opened). None of this is unique to vegan restaurants. It’s just that vegan restaurants tend to be small, independent and newish, which in this economy is rather like being the slowest wildebeest.
But I want to be honest here, because sentimentality is a poor substitute for criticism, and the vegan scene has been drowning in the former for years. Some of these places deserved to close.