The best vegan restaurants London has to offer
How to embrace the vegan diet in London: plant-based dining carnivores will love too
The best vegan restaurants London has to offer
There's no better time to embrace veganism than right now. Whether it is on a full-time, part-time or 'flexitarian' veg-curious basis, plant-forward eating is going mainstream. What's more, with some of the most exciting vegan restaurants on this planet, we are proud to say that London is putting itself at the forefront of this food revolution.
Over the past few years there’s been a collective rally of the conscience: veganism is no longer seen purely as a militant movement, and a creative wave of new restaurants have appeared to satisfy an increased appetite for conscientious plant-based cooking.
Why all the hype?
It's now hard to avoid the torrent of delectable plant-based dishes on Instagram, and there’s even a new monthly vegan street-food market in Hackney organized by blogger Fat Gay Vegan. But with growing evidence of the skin-glowing, energy-boosting, planet-saving benefits of an animal and dairy free lifestyle, we think that this is one trend that is more than worth paying attention to. To help you out here is our list of top London spots that are making veganism interesting.
The Brook
The Brook started off as a pop-up in Hackney, recreating comfort food favourites, including quesadillas, skewers and deep-fried bites. It is now re-launching as a food box service, delivering frozen restaurant-quality meals to your door. As a first phase, they are offering taste taster boxes with multiple mains and sweet treats to treat your taste buds with.
Price: Taste taster boxes for £48
Click here to read our full review and here to order a box
Wulf & Lamb
243 Pavilion Rd, Chelsea, London SW1X 0BP
Recently opened in the smart foodie enclave of Pavilion Road, sleek, buzzy Scandi style Wulf & Lamb is setting new standards for plant-led comfort food.
Standout dishes include the well-spiced Thai green curry and the incredibly moreish vegan mac n cheese made with cashew cream, turmeric and mustard. Superb desserts include mango and passionfruit cheesecake with a macadamia, pistachio and sesame base, and tiramisu made with raw almond cream. The cherries on the cake are the rose and pistachio doughnuts by top vegan baker Ruby’s of London.
Menu must order: ackee scramble for breakfast
Price: £40.00+ dinner for two including drinks
Click here to book
By Chloe
Everything about By Chloe. screams NYC cool, from the full stop in its name to its determination to call itself ‘plant-based’ instead of just plain vegan. But aside from that, there’s more than enough to draw in animal-loving punters - from its central Covent Garden location to its vegan mac and cheese and quinoa taco salad.
First things first. By Chloe. (yes, with the full stop) is the name of the restaurant, not the owner. The restaurant is “plant-based”, not vegetarian. They have eight branches in the US and this is their first across the pond with some dishes developed specially for Londoners.
All NYC-speak aside, ultra-hip vegan joint By Chloe. sounds promising.
On the entirely vegan menu, there’s quinoa taco salad, a guac burger, matcha kelp noodles, and thrillingly, vegan mac and cheese, which is a BIG DEAL if you can’t eat dairy. There will be dairy-free ice cream, plus baked goods, sandwiches, salads and soups.
Menu must order: quinoa taco salad
Price: £20.00 for lunch/salad
Click here for more information
Essence Restaurant
4 Leonard St, London EC2A 4RH
A swish, 100% plant-based restaurant in Shoreditch led by LA celebrity chef Matthew Kenney described by Forbes magazine as ‘having a certain glow about him’ .
The interior is sharp and minimal with aluminium walls and a concrete bar, and it should be noted that the seating arrangement is not conducive to lingered dining, with tiny tables and bench seating.
At breakfast try the surprisingly fluffy scrambled chickpeas with ‘massaged’ kale and spicy green harissa, asparagus and mushrooms. We also loved the lively spicing of slurpy, springy Pad Thai made with kelp noodles, tamari almonds and lime. The brownies made with raw cocao and the chewy, toffee-like Medjool date ‘caramel’ are utter revelations.
Menu must order: Heirloom tomato lasagne, a reinterpretation of a classic, made with courgette in place of pasta, sundried tomato sauce, pistachio pesto and creamy, macademia ‘ricotta’
Price: £40.00+ dinner for two including drinks
Click here to book
Nama
110 Talbot Road, Notting Hill Gate W11 1JR
110 Talbot Road, Notting Hill Gate W11 1JR
A favourite gem off Westbourne Grove, Nama serve up not only vegan but also raw food and they even run cookery courses as well. The philosophy behind going raw is that food cooked above 115°F begins to lose vital vitamins and minerals, and that just won't do. Their ‘sushi’ has to be tried alongside courgette and cashew hummus. Deliciously Ella is apparently obsessed with their desserts including salted caramel chocolate cake
Menu must order: fermented blueberry cheesecake
Price: £40.00+ dinner for two with drinks
Click here to book
Mildred’s
Restaurants in Soho, King’s Cross, Camden and Dalston
While not strictly vegan, Mildred’s is a vegetarian restaurant with a simple, healthy and wide-ranging menu, with lots of choice for vegans. Taking inspiration from across the globe – dishes from Sri Lanka, Thailand, China and Mexico all feature, along with some modern British favourites – Mildred’s was ahead of the vegetarian game when it opened 30 years ago in 1988. Today, each of its four outlets are almost always busy with diners chasing the now popular plant-based diet.
Menu must order: The Sri lankan curry with sweet potato, green bean, roasted lime cashews, pea basmati rice, coconut tomato sambal
Price: Around £25 for three courses
Click here to find out more
Manna
4 Erskine Road, Primrose Hill, London NW3 3AJ
Strewn with pretty fairy lights and gorgeous plant-inspired wallpaper, Manna has incredibly been around for fifty years, which makes it a real trailblazer. Their most famous dish speaks for itself: 'fennel and pumpkin seed sausages on a bed of parsnip & carrot mash served with cavalo nero on a red wine, leek & thyme jus'
Menu must order: Nori wraps of parsnip 'rice', beets, avocado and carrots, served with tamari dip and pea & wasabi coulis
Price: £70+ dinner for two including drinks
Click here to book
Ms Cupcake
408 Coldharbour Lane, Brixton, London, SW9 8LF
And for dessert, London's first entirely vegan bakery whips up the kind of light fluffy treats that will make bakers everywhere think 'who needs butter?'. There's much more than just cupcakes, but they are certainly a highlight. Current flavours include bakewell tart, black forest gateau, lemon earl grey.
Menu must order: highly naughty peanut and chocolate cupcake
Price: £15.00 for two for a full splurge
Click here for more details
Wild Cafe
1st Floor, 14 Neal's Yard, Covent Garden, WC2H 9DP
Although not strictly vegan, Wild Food’s colourful and creative mostly plant-passionate food is so joyful, up-lifting and served with such passion that we have to include them. Their location overlooking lively, ultra foodie Neal’s Yard is delightful too. Founded way back in the 1970s they source only from local independent, ethical suppliers and use plenty of wild foods. Everything sounds so appetizing from raw pizza to oyster mushroom ‘scallops’ with a herby coconut dip. We also love the coconut and kimchi sweet potato brownie.
Menu must order: pine pollen, rose and pistachio latte with house doughnut
Price: £60.00+ dinner for two with drinks
Click here for more details
Tanya’s Café
35 Ixworth Pl, Chelsea, London SW3 3QX
Part of Myhotel Chelsea, a cosy restaurant with a highly nutritional raw, vegan, organic menu devised by wellness coach Tanya Maher. Expect a auge choice of interesting drinks, juices and homemade nut mylks with turmeric, plus unusual sharing plates from ‘active’ falafel with cashew tzatski, kale and quinoa tabouleh to coconut pumpkin wedges. Six choices of vegan cheesecake and truffles also await.
Menu must order: rainbow pad thai and tiramisu cheesecake
Price: £60.00+ dinner for two including drinks
Click here for more details
Redemption Notting Hill
6 Chepstow Road, W11 320 Old St, London EC1V 9DR
Stylish restaurants proving that vegan, alcohol-free, sugar and wheat-free need not be boring or self-righteous. Choose from likes of maki rolls with quinoa and amaranth micro shoots, and heritage beetroot barley risotto with pecan nut ‘parmesan’. Beautiful mocktails too.
Menu must order: sweetcorn and red pepper pancakes
Click here for more details
Itadaki zen
139 King’s Cross Road, WC1X 9BJ
London’s first vegan Japanese restaurant is a quirky revelation with classic dishes from spring rolls and sushi to tempura made with seaweed and hot-pots that use plenty of fashion forward fermented products. It is decidedly quirky and runs plenty of associated cultural events.
Menu must order: vegan sushi
Price: £40.00+ dinner for two including drinks
Click here for more information
Cook Daily
Dalston Boxpark 8, 2-4 Bethnal Green Rd, London E1 6GY
Highly nutritious and delicious plant based ‘bowls’, each as colourful as a rainbow and rammed with vegetables that pack a punch. They are served in recycled cardboard bowls. Order the full English with tofu scramble, mushrooms and non-bacon, their legendary spicy stir-fry or the jerk vegetable pot. This is top-grade rustic vegan food in a shipping container and one of the most satisfying and unpretentious places in town.
Menu must order: Laotian stir-fry
Price: £20.00 for two
Click here for more information
Tredwell’s
Tredwell's, 4A Upper St Martin's Lane, WC2H 9NY
Chantelle Nicholson is leading the way among high-end non-vegan restaurants that offer vegan options on the menu. Her vegan book "Planted" is published in April 2018. As she has noted, 'we need to be more conscious of how to use more plant based food and trying new textures and tastes is a great way to explore flavour'. Current dishes include a roast cauliflower dish using every part of the vegetable with pickled stalks and crispy leaves, roast cauliflower puree and saffron aioli and a comforting peanut pudding. There’s a good choice of vegan wines too.
Must try dish: roast sweetcorn soup with charred kernels and sweetcorn and tarragon fritters
Price: £90.00+ dinner for two including drinks
Click here to book
Temple of Seitan
10 Morning Lane, London E9 6NA / 103a Camley Street, N1C 4PF
Vegans crave fast food too. Here to cater for their wants is Temple of Seitan in Hackney, a ‘vegan fried chicken shop’ (yes, really). The menu features typical end-of-night favourites, from burgers with all the toppings to ‘chicken’ pieces and chips, and popcorn bites. Sides of slaw and mac ‘n cheese also feature on the menu, completing the joint’s southern vibe. The best bit? It really does look and taste like authentic fried chicken (especially after a few gin and tonics). Proving a success with the local crowd of young, hip eco-warriors, Temple of Seitan has now opened a second outlet in Camden. The team certainly know where to find their market.
Menu must order: The Temple Spicy burger: Chick’n Fillet, Chipotle Mayo, Coleslaw, Cheese, Jalapenos, Sriracha
Price: Burgers from £4 - £6; full meals for around £10
Click here to book
The Meet
15-16 Lendal Terrace, Clapham, SW4 7UX
This pop-up restaurant has no airs and graces about it, but specialises in vegan comfort food, turning millennial favourites into plant-based goodness with inspiration derived from across the world – think mac’n’cheese, wings, and pineapple upside-down-cake but with enough miso, sumac and avocado to turn even turkey twizzlers into trend-aware nosh. Hearty and wholesome, the menu brims with winter-warmers and some lighter options thrown in, complete with a bespoke all-vegan cocktail list. Tucked under the railway arches by Clapham North station, the industrial backdrop with trains rumbling above provides all the urban ambience one could wish for.
Menu must order: A Nugget of Gold, Ain't It Cold Out
Price: Mains around £8-£12
Click here to read our review
Over the past few years there’s been a collective rally of the conscience: veganism is no longer seen purely as a militant movement, and a creative wave of new restaurants have appeared to satisfy an increased appetite for conscientious plant-based cooking.
Why all the hype?
It's now hard to avoid the torrent of delectable plant-based dishes on Instagram, and there’s even a new monthly vegan street-food market in Hackney organized by blogger Fat Gay Vegan. But with growing evidence of the skin-glowing, energy-boosting, planet-saving benefits of an animal and dairy free lifestyle, we think that this is one trend that is more than worth paying attention to. To help you out here is our list of top London spots that are making veganism interesting.
The Brook
The Brook started off as a pop-up in Hackney, recreating comfort food favourites, including quesadillas, skewers and deep-fried bites. It is now re-launching as a food box service, delivering frozen restaurant-quality meals to your door. As a first phase, they are offering taste taster boxes with multiple mains and sweet treats to treat your taste buds with.
Price: Taste taster boxes for £48
Click here to read our full review and here to order a box
Wulf & Lamb
243 Pavilion Rd, Chelsea, London SW1X 0BP
Recently opened in the smart foodie enclave of Pavilion Road, sleek, buzzy Scandi style Wulf & Lamb is setting new standards for plant-led comfort food.
Standout dishes include the well-spiced Thai green curry and the incredibly moreish vegan mac n cheese made with cashew cream, turmeric and mustard. Superb desserts include mango and passionfruit cheesecake with a macadamia, pistachio and sesame base, and tiramisu made with raw almond cream. The cherries on the cake are the rose and pistachio doughnuts by top vegan baker Ruby’s of London.
Menu must order: ackee scramble for breakfast
Price: £40.00+ dinner for two including drinks
Click here to book
By Chloe
Everything about By Chloe. screams NYC cool, from the full stop in its name to its determination to call itself ‘plant-based’ instead of just plain vegan. But aside from that, there’s more than enough to draw in animal-loving punters - from its central Covent Garden location to its vegan mac and cheese and quinoa taco salad.
First things first. By Chloe. (yes, with the full stop) is the name of the restaurant, not the owner. The restaurant is “plant-based”, not vegetarian. They have eight branches in the US and this is their first across the pond with some dishes developed specially for Londoners.
All NYC-speak aside, ultra-hip vegan joint By Chloe. sounds promising.
On the entirely vegan menu, there’s quinoa taco salad, a guac burger, matcha kelp noodles, and thrillingly, vegan mac and cheese, which is a BIG DEAL if you can’t eat dairy. There will be dairy-free ice cream, plus baked goods, sandwiches, salads and soups.
Menu must order: quinoa taco salad
Price: £20.00 for lunch/salad
Click here for more information
Essence Restaurant
4 Leonard St, London EC2A 4RH
A swish, 100% plant-based restaurant in Shoreditch led by LA celebrity chef Matthew Kenney described by Forbes magazine as ‘having a certain glow about him’ .
The interior is sharp and minimal with aluminium walls and a concrete bar, and it should be noted that the seating arrangement is not conducive to lingered dining, with tiny tables and bench seating.
At breakfast try the surprisingly fluffy scrambled chickpeas with ‘massaged’ kale and spicy green harissa, asparagus and mushrooms. We also loved the lively spicing of slurpy, springy Pad Thai made with kelp noodles, tamari almonds and lime. The brownies made with raw cocao and the chewy, toffee-like Medjool date ‘caramel’ are utter revelations.
Menu must order: Heirloom tomato lasagne, a reinterpretation of a classic, made with courgette in place of pasta, sundried tomato sauce, pistachio pesto and creamy, macademia ‘ricotta’
Price: £40.00+ dinner for two including drinks
Click here to book
Nama
110 Talbot Road, Notting Hill Gate W11 1JR
110 Talbot Road, Notting Hill Gate W11 1JR
A favourite gem off Westbourne Grove, Nama serve up not only vegan but also raw food and they even run cookery courses as well. The philosophy behind going raw is that food cooked above 115°F begins to lose vital vitamins and minerals, and that just won't do. Their ‘sushi’ has to be tried alongside courgette and cashew hummus. Deliciously Ella is apparently obsessed with their desserts including salted caramel chocolate cake
Menu must order: fermented blueberry cheesecake
Price: £40.00+ dinner for two with drinks
Click here to book
Mildred’s
Restaurants in Soho, King’s Cross, Camden and Dalston
While not strictly vegan, Mildred’s is a vegetarian restaurant with a simple, healthy and wide-ranging menu, with lots of choice for vegans. Taking inspiration from across the globe – dishes from Sri Lanka, Thailand, China and Mexico all feature, along with some modern British favourites – Mildred’s was ahead of the vegetarian game when it opened 30 years ago in 1988. Today, each of its four outlets are almost always busy with diners chasing the now popular plant-based diet.
Menu must order: The Sri lankan curry with sweet potato, green bean, roasted lime cashews, pea basmati rice, coconut tomato sambal
Price: Around £25 for three courses
Click here to find out more
Manna
4 Erskine Road, Primrose Hill, London NW3 3AJ
Strewn with pretty fairy lights and gorgeous plant-inspired wallpaper, Manna has incredibly been around for fifty years, which makes it a real trailblazer. Their most famous dish speaks for itself: 'fennel and pumpkin seed sausages on a bed of parsnip & carrot mash served with cavalo nero on a red wine, leek & thyme jus'
Menu must order: Nori wraps of parsnip 'rice', beets, avocado and carrots, served with tamari dip and pea & wasabi coulis
Price: £70+ dinner for two including drinks
Click here to book
Ms Cupcake
408 Coldharbour Lane, Brixton, London, SW9 8LF
And for dessert, London's first entirely vegan bakery whips up the kind of light fluffy treats that will make bakers everywhere think 'who needs butter?'. There's much more than just cupcakes, but they are certainly a highlight. Current flavours include bakewell tart, black forest gateau, lemon earl grey.
Menu must order: highly naughty peanut and chocolate cupcake
Price: £15.00 for two for a full splurge
Click here for more details
Wild Cafe
1st Floor, 14 Neal's Yard, Covent Garden, WC2H 9DP
Although not strictly vegan, Wild Food’s colourful and creative mostly plant-passionate food is so joyful, up-lifting and served with such passion that we have to include them. Their location overlooking lively, ultra foodie Neal’s Yard is delightful too. Founded way back in the 1970s they source only from local independent, ethical suppliers and use plenty of wild foods. Everything sounds so appetizing from raw pizza to oyster mushroom ‘scallops’ with a herby coconut dip. We also love the coconut and kimchi sweet potato brownie.
Menu must order: pine pollen, rose and pistachio latte with house doughnut
Price: £60.00+ dinner for two with drinks
Click here for more details
Tanya’s Café
35 Ixworth Pl, Chelsea, London SW3 3QX
Part of Myhotel Chelsea, a cosy restaurant with a highly nutritional raw, vegan, organic menu devised by wellness coach Tanya Maher. Expect a auge choice of interesting drinks, juices and homemade nut mylks with turmeric, plus unusual sharing plates from ‘active’ falafel with cashew tzatski, kale and quinoa tabouleh to coconut pumpkin wedges. Six choices of vegan cheesecake and truffles also await.
Menu must order: rainbow pad thai and tiramisu cheesecake
Price: £60.00+ dinner for two including drinks
Click here for more details
Redemption Notting Hill
6 Chepstow Road, W11 320 Old St, London EC1V 9DR
Stylish restaurants proving that vegan, alcohol-free, sugar and wheat-free need not be boring or self-righteous. Choose from likes of maki rolls with quinoa and amaranth micro shoots, and heritage beetroot barley risotto with pecan nut ‘parmesan’. Beautiful mocktails too.
Menu must order: sweetcorn and red pepper pancakes
Click here for more details
Itadaki zen
139 King’s Cross Road, WC1X 9BJ
London’s first vegan Japanese restaurant is a quirky revelation with classic dishes from spring rolls and sushi to tempura made with seaweed and hot-pots that use plenty of fashion forward fermented products. It is decidedly quirky and runs plenty of associated cultural events.
Menu must order: vegan sushi
Price: £40.00+ dinner for two including drinks
Click here for more information
Cook Daily
Dalston Boxpark 8, 2-4 Bethnal Green Rd, London E1 6GY
Highly nutritious and delicious plant based ‘bowls’, each as colourful as a rainbow and rammed with vegetables that pack a punch. They are served in recycled cardboard bowls. Order the full English with tofu scramble, mushrooms and non-bacon, their legendary spicy stir-fry or the jerk vegetable pot. This is top-grade rustic vegan food in a shipping container and one of the most satisfying and unpretentious places in town.
Menu must order: Laotian stir-fry
Price: £20.00 for two
Click here for more information
Tredwell’s
Tredwell's, 4A Upper St Martin's Lane, WC2H 9NY
Chantelle Nicholson is leading the way among high-end non-vegan restaurants that offer vegan options on the menu. Her vegan book "Planted" is published in April 2018. As she has noted, 'we need to be more conscious of how to use more plant based food and trying new textures and tastes is a great way to explore flavour'. Current dishes include a roast cauliflower dish using every part of the vegetable with pickled stalks and crispy leaves, roast cauliflower puree and saffron aioli and a comforting peanut pudding. There’s a good choice of vegan wines too.
Must try dish: roast sweetcorn soup with charred kernels and sweetcorn and tarragon fritters
Price: £90.00+ dinner for two including drinks
Click here to book
Temple of Seitan
10 Morning Lane, London E9 6NA / 103a Camley Street, N1C 4PF
Vegans crave fast food too. Here to cater for their wants is Temple of Seitan in Hackney, a ‘vegan fried chicken shop’ (yes, really). The menu features typical end-of-night favourites, from burgers with all the toppings to ‘chicken’ pieces and chips, and popcorn bites. Sides of slaw and mac ‘n cheese also feature on the menu, completing the joint’s southern vibe. The best bit? It really does look and taste like authentic fried chicken (especially after a few gin and tonics). Proving a success with the local crowd of young, hip eco-warriors, Temple of Seitan has now opened a second outlet in Camden. The team certainly know where to find their market.
Menu must order: The Temple Spicy burger: Chick’n Fillet, Chipotle Mayo, Coleslaw, Cheese, Jalapenos, Sriracha
Price: Burgers from £4 - £6; full meals for around £10
Click here to book
The Meet
15-16 Lendal Terrace, Clapham, SW4 7UX
This pop-up restaurant has no airs and graces about it, but specialises in vegan comfort food, turning millennial favourites into plant-based goodness with inspiration derived from across the world – think mac’n’cheese, wings, and pineapple upside-down-cake but with enough miso, sumac and avocado to turn even turkey twizzlers into trend-aware nosh. Hearty and wholesome, the menu brims with winter-warmers and some lighter options thrown in, complete with a bespoke all-vegan cocktail list. Tucked under the railway arches by Clapham North station, the industrial backdrop with trains rumbling above provides all the urban ambience one could wish for.
Menu must order: A Nugget of Gold, Ain't It Cold Out
Price: Mains around £8-£12
Click here to read our review
