Triangle Vegan Restaurant Week Celebrates Plant-Based Foods

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By Karen Pullen

More and more Triangle-area restaurants have added vegan options to their menus as demand continues to grow for plant-based foods. There’s more to eating vegan than just salads and to prove it, I’m organizing Triangle Vegan Restaurant Week (TVRW) in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area.

TVRW will be celebrated Nov. 1-7, 2021, in conjunction with World Vegan Month. Throughout the week, participating restaurants and food trucks will offer a special vegan menu in addition to their regular fare. To date, Carrboro’s participating restaurants include Mosaic Café & Bistro, Grata Café, Carrburritos and Coronato Pizza. In Chapel Hill, look for special vegan menus from Margaret’s Cantina, Market & Moss, Root Cellar and Vegan Flava, joined by the food truck Stairway to Veggin. Sixteen additional restaurants throughout the Triangle will showcase their plant-based creativity.

Our mission is threefold:

• To encourage Triangle-area restaurants to add inventive plant-based dishes to their menus;
• To show vegans, vegetarians and veg-curious diners that we have highly talented chefs in town who know how to create delicious and inventive vegan food;
• To allow all diners to discover the great variety of flavor and ingredients in Triangle-area vegan dining options.

In the past five years or so, Vegan Restaurant Weeks have been popping up in several US communities, such as Philadelphia, Colorado Springs, Fort Wayne, IN, Providence RI, as well as in Maryland and Southwest Florida. They have been very successful for the participating businesses. After reading about them, I thought – why not here? The Triangle has a thriving, exciting food scene that should welcome an expanding awareness of plant-based dining options.

In fact, in 2010, Bull City Vegan (BCV) helped turn the Triangle into a vegan-friendly area by building vegan partnerships and options in our community. They organized the original Vegan Chef Challenge, the Bull City Vegan Challenge, where local chefs prepare a creative vegan dish and diners vote on which is the best! BCV are dedicated to promoting local restaurants and food trucks, as well as local vegan-friendly events and other activities. Their Instagram page is active and is the best way to follow them.

You don’t have to be vegan to enjoy TVRW. You just need to have a love for great food and the desire to try something new.

For a full list of participating restaurants and menus (which will be added soon) or to sign up as a participating restaurant, visit www.triangleveganrestaurantweek.com. The deadline for restaurants to sign up to participate is Oct. 15.

Follow our Instagram (@triangleveganweek) and Facebook (@triangleveganweek) pages to keep abreast of what’s happening.

Karen Pullen teaches healthy plant-based cooking in Chapel Hill. She is a Food for Life instructor and is certified in plant-based nutrition from Cornell. Her website is www.everydayplant-based.com. Write to her at karenwpullen@gmail.com.