Plenty of restaurants offer fantastic vegan food. No matter where you live or visit, you’ll find places well worth checking out. So let’s go over the easiest ways to find the best vegan dining choices near you.
Online Tools for Discovering Vegan Restaurants
Several online tools excel at spotlighting your best nearby vegan dining choices. The most powerful method involves searching Google Maps for “vegan restaurants.”
Apple’s Maps app also lists vegan restaurants, but Google Maps remains more comprehensive and features far more user reviews. In fact, the reviews on Apple Maps are outsourced through TripAdvisor. Google Maps comes preinstalled on every Android phone. If you have an iPhone, you can download Google Maps for free from the App Store.
I have Google Maps installed on my iPhone and I consider it a must-have for every vegan who travels. I find Apple Maps so inferior to Google Maps when it comes to searching for vegan restaurants that I don’t use it for that purpose.
To discover even more vegan dining possibilities, visit HappyCow.net. As with Apple Maps, HappyCow can’t equal Google Maps’ overall usefulness, but its reviews are written primarily by vegans and are therefore quite helpful.
Vegetarian and Vegan Restaurants
With any luck, your searches will turn up several vegetarian or vegan restaurants nearby. Surprisingly, many vegetarian restaurants aren’t all that vegan-friendly and will frequently cook with lots of dairy products. So never drop your guard when dining at vegetarian restaurants, since if you don’t stay vigilant you’re likely to be served a non-vegan dish. Assume nothing is vegan unless the menu says so.
Fortunately, in much of the world, vegan restaurants outnumber vegetarian restaurants. Dining at vegan restaurants offers a much easier experience than eating anywhere else. You can pick any item from the menu without hesitation. You’re supporting an establishment whose values match up with your own. Kitchen cross-contamination with meat just can’t happen. Additionally, even if your order gets messed up, you’ll never find grated cheese in your food.
Vegan and Vegetarian Restaurant Chains
When traveling, three excellent vegan chains are Loving Hut, Veggie Grill, and Slutty Vegan. There are more than 130 Loving Hut restaurants worldwide. Veggie Grill operates more than a dozen locations in the United States.
The Hare Krishna sect likewise operates dozens of vegetarian restaurants worldwide. These spots are usually named, “Govinda’s.” As with Loving Hut restaurants, each Govinda’s is independently owned, so the menus differ by location. Govinda’s restaurants usually offer Indian-style buffets. Most of these restaurants cook with dairy products, but never eggs. In nearly all cases the vegan menu options will be clearly identified.
Non-Vegetarian But Vegan-Friendly Restaurants
If you can’t find vegan restaurants nearby, countless mainstream restaurants serve delicious vegan food. Familiarizing yourself with the most vegan-friendly cuisines will enable you to order with confidence.
Some cuisines are filled with wonderful vegan dishes while others (For instance: Colombian, Korean, and French restaurants) have little to offer. So let’s now run through the cuisines that are especially welcoming to vegans.
Middle Eastern
When there’s no vegan restaurant nearby, my default backup is to look for Middle Eastern food. Any restaurant that’s Lebanese, Israeli, Egyptian, Jordanian, or Iraqi will offer a number of satisfying vegan dishes.
Whether served in wraps or pita bread, falafel and hummus are two of the tastiest and most satisfying foods in existence. Tahini dressing is usually vegan. A delicious creamy eggplant dish called baba ghanoush is often vegan as well. But in both cases ask if they contain yogurt. The easiest way to find nearby restaurants serving this cuisine is to search Google Maps for falafel.
If typical salads don’t do it for you, you must give tabbouleh a try. It’s a healthy and delicious Middle Eastern salad that’s invariably vegan. It’s made with bulgur wheat, ripe tomatoes, mint, parsley, and olive oil. Middle Eastern restaurants also consistently serve some of the most delicious lettuce-based salads you’ll find anywhere. Turns out that freshly prepared falafel balls are a fantastic addition to salad!
Ethiopian
Ethiopian cuisine is another excellent vegan-friendly possibility. The food has wonderful flavors, and the vegan dishes will really fill you up.
As with Middle Eastern food, dairy products rarely make their way into Ethiopian cooking. As long as you don’t order meat, you have a great chance of getting an entirely vegan meal. Just confirm that the restaurant in question cooks their stews with vegetable oil rather than butter. Also specify “no dairy” to eliminate the chance they’ll garnish your meal with sour cream.
Italian
Italian food provides another enticing restaurant option for vegans. Just be warned that fresh pasta usually contains egg whites, whereas most dried pasta is vegan. This means that the spaghetti with marinara sauce at any Italian restaurant should be vegan (but specify no Parmesan!) Same goes for pizza with the cheese left off. The crust at independently-owned pizzerias is nearly always vegan. These places make their dough from scratch, using just flour, yeast, water, a pinch of sugar, and salt. But several chains, including Dominos and Pizza Hut, add milk products to some of their pizza dough.
The salads at Italian restaurants are typically very good, and easy to order vegan.
Indian
Indian food is hands down the most vegetarian-friendly cuisine on the planet. Yet Indian restaurants are difficult for vegans to navigate since dairy products appear in the majority of dishes. Even more frustratingly, they often show up in tiny quantities and are therefore impossible to detect visually.
You nevertheless have several reliably vegan Indian options. One of the most popular Indian dishes, chana masala (curried chickpeas), is practically always vegan. Most Indian places will also serve rice, chapati, or roti that’s cooked without butter. Just ask to find out.
South Indian food is frequently dairy-free. Since cows don’t thrive in the extreme heat of South India, authentic cooking from this region uses far less dairy than recipes from the North. Perhaps the most popular vegan South Indian dish is dosas. These are gigantic pancake rolls made from fermented lentil batter. Dosas are delicious and no other cuisine offers anything similar. They’re commonly stuffed with spiced potatoes and curried vegetables. On the side, you’ll often get spicy red and cooling coconut dipping sauces. Fancier restaurants may fry your dosa in ghee (clarified butter), but the vast majority of places use vegetable oil for frying.
Mexican
Apart from Indian food, no cuisine offers more vegan possibilities than Mexican cooking. Unfortunately, most mainstream Mexican restaurants pose numerous obstacles to vegans. Rice may be boiled in chicken stock. Beans are commonly fried in lard. And even the guacamole can include sour cream. Not so long ago, wheat-flour tortillas typically contained animal fats, but that’s no longer the case. With that in mind, I typically avoid eating out at Mexican places that don’t go out of their way to accommodate vegans.
Vegan Fast Food
When you’re traveling and short on time, vegan fast food can save the day. Because fast food chains have standardized menus, you can easily and reliably discover all their vegan options. Every major fast food chain publishes complete ingredient information on their websites.
Many of the largest chains, including Taco Bell, Burger King, and Subway, have solid vegan options. Discover all your best choices by visiting my vegan fast food guide.
Vegan Veggie Burgers
The vast majority of hamburger chains now offer veggie burgers. Unfortunately, the vegan status of these burgers varies from chain to chain. Plus, many of these chains periodically switch suppliers, so you have no long-term guarantees about a given item’s vegan status.
Additionally, many fast food restaurants cook their veggie burgers on the same grill as hamburgers—which is unacceptable to some vegans, and at least moderately repulsive to others. Some of these chains can microwave your patty upon request.
Vegan Mexican Food
The restaurant industry classifies Chipotle Mexican Grill, Qdoba, and Taco Del Mar as a step up from conventional fast food. And from a vegan perspective, these chains serve vastly superior food. At any of these restaurants you can order a vegan burrito stuffed with rice, beans, guacamole, salsa, and lettuce. And both Chipotle and Qdoba also offer delicious seasoned tofu as a filling.
All three of these Mexican-style chains publish lists on their websites featuring their vegan offerings.
Vegan Dining at Casual Chains
The industry calls restaurants like Applebee’s, TGIFriday’s, and Denny’s, “casual dining.” Vegans tend to avoid these places. Some of these chains have OK vegan options, and things are slowly improving.
Casual dining restaurants often use packaged frozen meals that the kitchen staff merely heat up, often with a microwave. Employees rarely know what’s in your food since they don’t make it from scratch. But with a little online research, you can find out which menu items are vegan. Just visit the chain’s website and hunt around. In most cases, you can find the ingredients for every menu item.
Vegan Foods at PF Chang’s, the Olive Garden, and Denny’s,
PF Chang’s is one shining exception to the paucity of vegan dining options offered at casual chains. Their vegan offerings are terrific and inexpensive, and serving sizes are huge. Everything on PF Chang’s vegetable menu section is vegan. They do add cane sugar to some of these items, which might be processed through filters containing bone char. But that’s not worthy of much concern, since this method of sugar filtration generates no meaningful income for the meat industry.
A couple other chains offer solid vegan choices. The Olive Garden publishes this PDF showing its vegan options. And Denny’s offers a vegan veggieburger. You can order it with these vegan toppings: ketchup, mustard, jalapeños, fresh avocado, sautéed mushrooms, grilled onions, barbecue sauce, or bourbon sauce. Denny’s has offered various veggie burgers over the years, but as of this writing their website doesn’t list one, and their vegan offerings are unimpressive and hard to identify.
Steak and Seafood Restaurants
Steak and seafood restaurants are obviously the least appealing places for vegans. Even so, at the best steakhouses you can order an excellent vegan dinner salad. Add Italian dressing and skip the cheese, egg, and croutons and you should be in business.
Seafood restaurants are the worst of all choices for vegans. You won’t find anything appealing on the menu. If you do get dragged to one of these places, you can probably order pasta prepared with olive oil and vegetables. Every seafood restaurant has these ingredients on hand. Granted, the whole experience will still smell like fish.
Restaurants Are Rapidly Becoming More Vegan-Friendly
Even if your local vegan dining options prove disappointing, take heart. Over time, things will improve. International campaigns like Meatless Mondays are gaining widespread attention. As vegan and plant-based diets work their way further into the mainstream, restaurant owners are paying attention. Many are eager to better accommodate vegans.
It’s easy to increase the vegan options in your community. Just use platforms like meetup.com to organize restaurant gatherings with other vegans. Many independently-owned restaurants will be thrilled to prepare special vegan menus for large gatherings. All you need to do is work things out with the owner in advance.
Remember that restaurants always want new business. So when customers politely request better vegan options, many establishments will respond favorably. But remember that your waitstaff doesn’t make the decisions, so always communicate these sorts of requests to the manager or owner.
Even if the place you live in isn’t yet vegan-friendly, one day it could be. And you can be a driving force to speed that transition.
Even Worst-Case Scenarios Aren’t So Bad
Despite all the fantastic vegan dining options worldwide, you might still have trouble finding good vegan restaurant food in small towns. In these cases you can avoid going hungry by visiting a local grocery store. A hotel kitchenette will enable you to cook basic grocery items like canned beans, rice, and pasta. See my vegan travel guide for additional advice on how to eat well when you’re away from home.
Every day, new vegan restaurants open. The parts of the world that pose serious challenges to vegans are receding fast. And all you have to do is follow the tips I’ve presented here to discover some of the most delicious vegan food you’ve ever eaten.
