Photo credit: Free Captures

Leafing Me Disappointed: Cadence and the Dubious Future of Restaurant Veganism

What is the purpose of a restaurant? To feed, to nourish: of course. To delight, to inspire: ideally so. To argue, to demonstrate: if yes, usually to showcase a locale or culture, or to highlight some achievement of beauty or pleasure. (Noma’s trompe-l’oeil beetle is, among other things, a miraculous achievement.) But Cadence, an inconspicuous restaurant seating a maximum of forty people in East Village, has, as its mission, a contention oxymoronic nearly to the point of absurdity: to prove the viability and excellence of vegan soul food.

Prove it does—at a cost. The cost of overflowing carbohydrates and fats without the texture or flavor of meat. The cost of marvelous flavor, but too little or too much of it. The cost of the impossibility of widespread implementation.

Some of these issues are the fault of the restaurant; others are fundamental to the problem of veganizing soul food—and food more broadly. Cadence—and others like it—pursue an admirable, necessary goal. But, if people vote with their wallets—“it’s the economy, stupid”—they dine with their taste buds. And while a Democrat might be able to be a governor of Montana or a senator of Missouri, taste might be the one thing even more immovable than politics. Cadence opens the door of possibility, but goes long on vision and short on substance: it would not survive in the South, or even in Harlem. As it currently operates, Cadence will remain a visionary—but no more.

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I was inspired to try the restaurant by You Are What You Eat, a recently (as of early 2024) published Netflix documentary tracking a twin study of omnivore-vs.-vegan diets but more broadly discussing the transgressions—environmental, moral, physiological—of our animal-based diets. Having read Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals nearly a decade prior and counting former and current vegans among my close friends, I didn’t think the documentary would be additionally informative or change my omnivoric lifestyle significantly. And it didn’t—except it did change my partner’s, who started filling her sandwiches with tofu instead of deli meat and requesting dinners with more chickpeas and less ground turkey.

Granted, she has always been more open to a less omnivoric diet than me, and generally more selective in her taste (but I am also the least picky eater I know, not unhappily cutting into tough “steaks” and spooning oversalted stews in my college dining hall days). When she first told me about Cadence, I was skeptical to the point of dismissiveness, and attitude I am chagrined to admit remained unchanged despite rave descriptions after her visit some months later. Whence my dismissiveness? Did I believe that soul food without ribs or chicken or catfish would be merely a succession of side dishes? That the lipidic atom bomb that is soul food wasn’t worth it without meat? That paying seventy dollars a head for vegan food was a scam?

Whatever the sub/conscious rationale, it took You Are What You Eat even to consider giving Cadence a shot. But, revisiting the menu, I found myself salivating at the offerings: “fried green tomatoes—romesco, parsley, panko;” “biscuits and gravy—porcini, carrots, buttermilk;” “smoked grits—tomatoes, rosemary butter, fried oyster mushrooms, garlic.” These dishes suggested something more organic—more natural, more graceful, less embarrassed at being vegan—than I’ve previously encountered (with the exception of dishes like the “fried oyster mushroom and waffles,” which is such a bald stand-in as to discourage ordering). I made a reservation and paid the fifty-dollar cancellation deposit.

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Cadence is run by Executive Chef Shenarri Freeman, who “embraced veganism […] as a means of putting her health first and taking control of her well-being;” its motto reads, “Eat. Drink. Start a Revolution.” The food at Cadence is soul (or soul-adjacent); diners are encouraged to share dishes, and portions range from finger food to large appetizers. The menu evokes, rather than enforces, course demarcations: the potato and kale salad sit alongside arancini; the buffalo mushroom sandwich is positioned beside the Southern fried lasagna. My partner and I ordered potato salad and fried green tomatoes as our “appetizers,” and grits and lasagna as our “entrées.”

The appetizers come off much better than the entrées. They are unpretentiously delicious, not arguing their point but showing that good food didn’t need any lift from animal products. The potato salad’s lack of mayonnaise is impossible to discern; it is, as Pete Wells wrote, “exactly the one you hope somebody will bring to the family reunion.” The fried green tomatoes, a signature of Yamil Comrie, the Chef de Cuisine, lack any of the mushiness that hobbles cooked tomatoes; the breading crunches and opens into an impossibly savory and oozing inside, like a popup picture book containing not some flimsy drawing but a live elephant.

The entrées, however, fill without fulfilling, functioning neither as dishes qua dishes or convincing the diner of their vegan mission. I state again that these are not called entrées—but they are grouped and priced as such: the grits and mushroom-and-waffles are $25; the lasagna, $31. The diner ordering obvious entrée items—the mushroom-and-waffles or the buffalo mushroom sandwich—should, therefore, expect similar experiences from the grits or the lasagna. But both of the latter fall short in this respect: the grits are copious but merely garnished with the tomatoes and mushrooms, rather than complemented by them; two spring roll-shaped coils of lasagna sit in a puddle of tomato sauce, leaving the diner to choose between oversized bites or disassembly in the puddle.

I frown at restaurants that encourage sharing but dictate the denominator; the lasagna would be much flawed if its shareability were its biggest problem. But a more fundamental issue weighs down the lasagna, and the grits for that matter: far from proving the viability of vegan soul food, they show how deprived it is without meat. From all of Cadence’s entrées, only those which are one-to-one meat replacements—as aforementioned, the mushroom-and-waffles and the buffalo mushroom sandwich—even begin to work. The rest are barely more than clumsy experiments or oversized sides.

Red Rooster, the Harlem landmark patronized by, among others, Barack Obama, offers a $12 side of grits— exactly where it should be and how much it should cost. There is a reason (besides cost) that one is served no more than a dollop of caviar or a coin of foie gras; the grits, which would have been perfect if a third of the portion, by the end induced something resembling stupefaction. As for the lasagna, about as perfect a culinary creation as exists, rolling its noodles, deep-frying it, and adding the sauce separately comes off not as refined or inventive but grandstanding and technical.

Why does vegan food struggle so much with this conundrum—with being good without being emulative or intellectual? Pete Wells wrote that Eleven Madison Park, the three-Michelin-starred restaurant that went vegan in 2021, featured vegetables “doing things no vegetable should be asked to do,” commenting later that “beets aren’t very good at pretending to be meat, but their ability to taste like beets is unrivaled.” Some of the best vegan or near-vegan dishes I’ve had—the roast-beet salad (coincidence) at Bar Primi; the steamed kimchi, tofu, and glass noodle dumplings at New Wonjo; the ratatouille at Le Diplomate—follow Wells’s understated observation: let the vegetables speak for themselves. One customer review I read described the heat of the buffalo mushroom sandwich as “overwhelming,” which doesn’t surprise me. When mushrooms take the place of chicken in a buffalo chicken sandwich, the original’s one-two punch of spicy and savory would become a riptide of capsaicin. With an infinitude of excellent mushroom dishes, why are the potato salad and fried green tomatoes so hard to entrée-ify?

And this is on easy mode—in a small restaurant in East Village with adventurous customers who believe in its mission. How would such a sandwich fare against a more typical consumer, one who looks at vegan food as a curious lifestyle choice at best and liberal hullaballoo at worst? Impossible Meat is such a good imitation of meat that it can fool a conservative media personality; if a vegan dish can’t pull that off—which is fine—it should at least be tasty and satisfying enough to compete with the animal-based options. Anything less would be failing to repay its supporters and admitting defeat to its detractors.

None of this mentions the fact that neither fried green tomatoes, potato salad, grits, nor Southern fried lasagna could be construed as healthy. They may be healthier than their animal-product counterparts, but that’s hardly the benchmark Cadence has set. (Lest my dear reader think this is a function of what I ordered: of the thirteen food items, only two, the kale salad and the collard green wraps, are neither fried nor predominantly carbohydrates.) Which leaves me pondering Cadence’s original proposition: is vegan soul food possible? Does Cadence’s food “put health first” and put diners “in control of their well-being?” Can it “start a revolution?”

It is not. It does not. It cannot.

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Veganism is not a self-evident truth. The evidence overwhelmingly favors it, but carbon output, blood cholesterol, and factory-farm videos do not a vegan make—or rather, do not enough vegans make. Vegan food must speak to the heart as dearly as porkbelly does to a Korean, or ribs to a Southerner, or sardines to a Hollander.

You Are What You Eat shows that the time for veganism is now: at no other point in history has the argument been more convincing, the alternatives more enticing, the need more pressing. But even as the documentary touted the possibility of veganism, it exposed its limits: its subjects struggled to eat enough, lost muscle mass, and found cooking vegan food constrictive and challenging.

These are only the flaws of the carrot (so to speak)—the stick is even less potent: the well-established facts of animal cruelty and climate impact have had minimal impact in changing global diets. And the requisite, colossal government intervention to make people change their diets—subsidization of the vegan diet’s staples coupled with enormous animal product-taxes, piled progressively by carbon output, natural resource consumption, and humaneness of methodology—is an undertaking laughably politically suicidal.

So, the only available talking points for veganism are its health and its taste. If so, Cadence and Eleven Madison Park and You are What You Eat are poor prophets of the gospel. I explained Cadence’s failures to my partner—who disagreed with my assessment—as such:

Animal products are probably as integral to Korean food as to soul food, if not more—there’s no word even for “vegan” in Korean. [Author’s note: checking as I write, Google Translate offers a phrase meaning, literally, “complete/total vegetarian.”] Now imagine if a vegan Korean restaurant opened—and the kimchi were fifteen dollars, and the mushroom porridge were twenty-five dollars. It’d be insulting. I’d never go. No Korean would. You can’t get away with New York prices serving that kind of food, but you also can’t pay New York rent without New York prices. It’s just a logical impossibility. It’d never survive.

My partner pointed to the success of Cadence—its press has been overwhelmingly positive—but much of the praise centers on its novelty rather than its merits. And the thing with novelty is that it has an expiry date—and I, for one, feel that novelty wearing thin.

In other words, Cadence is a concept restaurant: a place where veganism can manifest in various states of readiness, where the loyal and the curious alike can enjoy the offerings, where high prices offset low mass-market appeal. The concept store appears to thrive, and feels alive—its lines are long, its reservations scarce, its artistry daring. But for concept to become reality—to start an empire, or a revolution—it must emerge from its niche and conquer, by economy, convenience, or pleasure, not just me, but those who deride it, who live hand-to-mouth, who were raised otherwise. The world doesn’t need Cadence—it needs McCadence.

[Written 2024]