Meat the Vegans – actually innovative, creative vegan food

I’ve been vegan for ten years now. When I started it was specialist health food shops selling overpriced vegan food that you had to explicitly hunt for. Now being vegan is so much more accessible and trendy, but the ‘vegan market’ is saturated with samey and gimmicky food. The often dreaded ‘vegan meat’ largely looks like something vaguely resembling meat, with the tactile and olfactory consistency of cardboard. Recently, standards have fallen as supermarkets aggressively compete to corner the vegan-curious, offering fake meat products that are tantalising at first but unhealthy and bland.

I visited this restaurant with some friends in London. London is the worst culprit of this type of behaviour; ‘health food shops’ selling dreary vegan comestibles proliferate. In Camden, vegan offerings are absolutely full of poseur cuisine: overpriced experiences that should be paying you for the privilege of entering them.

So I was utterly surprised to wholly enjoy my time at this restaurant. I was staggered by the food, which is truly novel, innovative, and variegated. I had a vegan goat curry, which was the best meal I’ve had out in ten years; succulent and ambitiously structured. The waiting staff were full of genuine, rather than forced, warmth; the prices were modest.

Meat the Vegans is new, and needs support not to become another start-up erasure, so I’d really recommend doing everything you can to keep it afloat.