NYC Ranting 🗣
& Vegan Eats in Port Jervis
and Port Chester

Dear New York City, Where is your housemade eggy breakfast sandwich with housemade cashew cheese and housemade coconut bacon? Where is your housemade toasted meringue topped vegan ice cream? You can keep your packaged vegan options, NYC, while I head north.

The packaged food options are getting to be a bit much. And when Candle 79, New York City’s long-time “high brow” all-vegan eatery puts a Beyond Burger on its menu, you know there is a growing disconnect in the vegan food movement. I’ll say it–there is now a “Big Vegan Food” (like Big Pharma, Big Food, etc.) problem forming. And it is indoctrinating using the same tired values of Big Food: convenience, brand loyalty, and food ignorance.

On the other side of the values of Big Vegan Food are people with high standards using real foods to make real meals for their local community. No science labs, no millionaire funding, no bleeding meat, and a limited participation in the profit systems our movement is meant to avoid. Deliberate choices made with a respect all living things actually, including our environment. Deliberate choices made within a love and an appreciation of the capacity of plants. The epitome of this: Fogwood & Fig.

This sandwich. My goodness. Every bite is amazing: their chickpea flour “eggy” with their house melty cashew cheese, smoky coconut crisp, roasted scallion mayo, onion, tomato on local sourdough bread grilled with vegan butter. I inhaled it.

Food can be this good when your heart shines through it. This is why I loved Fogwood & Fig from first bite in my Burger Battle. The quality deserves the buzz of ridiculously processed science meat.

I want to not reference how adorable the couple behind Fogwood & Fig are. Adorable sounds patronizing or how you’d describe a teen heart throb. But I intuit something very special about the partnership as I sit in their space and eat her food. There is something so lovely about the old fashioned charm he offers to patrons as he chats them up, then delivers her outstanding food. They seem forged from molds long-gone, honoring the best of the past while being hopeful, progressive and quietly righteous in their adherence to ethical values and high standards. And their space, her food are the delivery systems. 💖

I was excited to stop by Bona Bona after seeing some really decadent pictures on Instagram. They have vegan ice cream options and offer an aquafaba-based vegan meringue to toast atop their creation; that’s their signature. But unfortunately there is lack of helpful signage on their menu at their Port Chester shop. And the sweet girls at the counter had no clue as to what toppings were vegan, though this picture would show plenty! Making the special trip I was a bit disappointed to leave with only the meringue topping. Toppings are my favorite part of the ice cream!

But c’mon though. Toasted vegan meringue?! I love that this is an option now at an omni-ice cream shop. I won’t be a brat. I’ll just plead that Bona Bona be proud of their vegan options by creating a store menu that notes them. Pretty please with toasted meringue on top! 🍨

The meringue in the car. Because it looked so good before I ate it… and during…

Also relatedly, New York City–where is your Honest Weight? Honest Weight is a food co-op I stopped in while in Albany and bought a whole bunch of bulk stuff. The answer is that nothing but chain stores can survive paying New York City’s rent. And so New York City just plain stinks in a lot of ways it used to not. But oh, another big box store that you can easily find in any exurb or suburb in the United States just opened on Sixth Avenue! Am I supposed to be excited by this? Is this going to sustain my desire to pay ridiculous loads of rent? No. And I won’t for more than I have to. So though I still blow a kiss to you from inside the traffic under the Promenade and across the way on the Kosciuszko Bridge, it is more for the New York City of my youth. The kind I skipped school for. The kind that was the foundation of my budding identity and my shaping values. It’s nostalgia.

F nostalgia. As rehash is churned out a mile a minute, it’s yet another marketed exploit. Do we need a Coming to America, Part two? About as much as we need a Bill & Ted‘s reboot. How about new ideas, new stories, new people. The folks with the resources only like to innovate in the small confines of what could be profitable. What is the opportunity cost for this? Immeasurable. Ugh!! Ok, rant over.