In 1984, at the age of eighteen, I did a threemonth trip through Europe, hitchhiking with a backpack from Finland to Greece. I had such a good time bouncing around with my backpack that, at twenty-one, after graduating from college, I traveled with my trusty backpack for another fifteen years, never living anywhere for more than five or six months at a time. I spent most of that time in Europe and Asia, but also traveled through North and Central America, Australia and the South Pacific, and the Caribbean. My habit was to spend a few months at a time teaching English, often in Taiwan, to earn and save money, and then resume my shoestring travels. I traveled to over fifty countries, and I managed to live on just a few thousand dollars for nine months a year. I loved changing my environment so that each day was an adventure. I was introduced to new people, new culture, and new cuisine everywhere I went.
But increasingly, the cuisine became a problem for me as a traveler because I had become a vegetarian as a college student. While I was attending the University of California at Santa Cruz, a friend brought me to a small, popular local restaurant, then called McDharma’s Natural Fast Foods (now Dharma’s). I ordered a Brahma Burger, made of beans, nuts, seeds, and grains. After I ate it, I began thinking hard about the source of meat burgers, my mind churning with images of the blood and suffering associated with it. I decided then and there to never eat red meat again.
When I returned to my travels after graduation, traveling as a vegetarian—or near-vegetarian—became challenging for me, especially in parts of the world where meat and fish are ubiquitous in the cuisine and vegetarianism is almost unknown. If I was unlikely to find a vegan or vegetarian restaurant, I asked locals where I could at least find a veg-friendly place so that I could eat and stay healthy and live in accordance with my beliefs. It was always a struggle.
Unfortunately, I continued to eat eggs and shrimp for a while, since I somehow didn’t see that as the same thing as eating animals. But when I informed a Buddhist master in Taiwan, with whom I studied privately, of my diet, he asked me in turn, “What is the difference between a shrimp and a cow?” There was no need to respond. The question answered itself profoundly. I gave up shrimp in that moment. For some reason, the master didn’t ask me the difference between an egg and a cow, so I continued to eat eggs a little while longer, until I came in contact with another spiritual teacher, Master Ching Hai, who helped me see that it was time to stop consuming eggs as well as honey and to stop wearing leather.
I loved changing my environment so that each day was an adventure. I was introduced to new people, new culture, and new cuisine everywhere I went.
As hard as it was to travel as a vegetarian, it was harder still to travel as a vegan. When I took a trip on the Yangtze River in China, I didn’t eat anything but white rice for a week. Seeing the inhumane way the animals were treated in China (animals were sold in markets still half-alive, hearts barely beating) further convinced me that I could never again eat them. But there were few options for me besides rice. At the time, there were no useful guides to vegetarian restaurants, and asking locals for suggestions rarely worked out. Traveling in Malaysia in 1991, after walking all day in the hot sun searching for vegan food, I nearly passed out from hunger and heat exhaustion, and had to be rescued by locals.
On a subsequent trip from Taiwan to India in 1999, accompanied by my then-partner, Irene Andersson, I was inspired to create the HappyCow website to help the world’s veg travelers find “safe” food. I often lamented aloud about my food woes while we were living in Rishikesh, in northern India at the base of the Himalayas. After hearing me complain again and again, Irene challenged me to take action. So within a few weeks I taught myself HTML. When I was ready to upload the very primitive, basic website, it took me a full two days to do so because the dial-up Internet connection was so bad. After various improvements and conversion to a dynamic database, HappyCow.net finally began to gain traction, and it really began to flourish a couple of years later when we added the ability for users to write their own reviews and upload photos.
In the past several years, the site has taken off with the help of new partnerships and the hard work of numerous contributors. HappyCow.net has grown into a worldwide community and has improved countless lives. People who used to complain about the painfully difficult search for veg food in foreign cities now can check out the innumerable restaurants listed on HappyCow, which are reviewed by their fellow travelers. They can even get the information via our mobile app. I’m always gratified to hear stories from our community about how HappyCow transformed traveling from a burden to a pleasure.
HappyCow is a user-generated content website; its content is contributed by members and other contributors worldwide.
HappyCow is a user-generated-content website; its content is contributed by members and other contributors worldwide. Its success has been achieved by a selfless international community of vegetarians and vegans who want to help others like themselves find up-to-date information on veg restaurants or health food stores. Presently, we feature over 25,000 veg and veg-friendly listings of restaurants and stores with upwards of 60,000 reviews. HappyCow has become an indispensable resource for veg travelers all over the world, and those travelers are in turn an indispensable resource for the site, updating it with information on a daily basis, sending in reviews, and participating in forum discussions.
But there’s more to the site than that. There’s listings of veg shops and bakeries, veg B&Bs, veg catering companies, veg organizations, and farmers' markets. There are articles on how to eat veg and stay healthy while traveling, addressing such matters as veg airplane meals and veg camping. There are articles on nutritional topics. There are links to all kinds of veg travel resources, such as guided veg travel or veg retreats. There are spotlights on different cities. There are blogs on wide-ranging subjects and there’s an incredibly long list of famous vegetarians—a list that is growing by the day. Visitors to HappyCow can find recipes, interactive maps to guide users to veg destinations, a VegIQ test, a shopping site, a live chat room, a veg humor page, our MooZine newsletter, and more.
We offer HappyCow apps for iPhones and Android phones. And there’s an evolving mobile web version for all other smartphones, too.
We strive to maintain the integrity of the site and to thereby help veg*ns (vegetarians and vegans) maintain the integrity of their diets. Our listings are defined by the level of “veg-ness” (vegan/vegetarian/veg-friendly). Each restaurant submission is reviewed and investigated. In order to get a listing on our site, a veg-friendly place has to demonstrate that it makes serious efforts to accommodate veg*ns and is not simply willing to leave out the meat. In addition, HappyCow volunteers moderate member reviews for adherence to our rules. I like to think that HappyCow’s emphasis on integrity is responsible for our good reputation and loyal following, and it’s why we’ve been voted favorite vegetarian website for seven consecutive years in the VegNews survey. The majority of HappyCow members are veg*ns themselves, so the contributions from our members are more attuned to the concerns of the veg*n community, and more accurate, than reviews one could find from mainstream sites like Yelp, OpenTable, or Google+ Local. When I say that veg*ns trust HappyCow, it’s just another way of saying that we trust our own community.
The restaurants selected for this volume have earned our support with their commitment to purely vegan food and with their high ratings from our members.
Yes, it’s possible to get a vegetarian meal, and sometimes a vegan meal, in a “regular” restaurant, and that’s why HappyCow includes veg-friendly listings. Veg-friendly listings on the site are decided on a case-by-case basis, allowing for such factors as the size of the town where the restaurant is located. But I personally like to eat at and support vegetarian, and preferably vegan, restaurants. That’s why we at HappyCow decided to create this cookbook to celebrate purely vegan restaurants. The restaurants selected for this volume have earned our support with their commitment to purely vegan food and with their high ratings from our members.
While these restaurants make an important contribution to the environment simply by shunning foods created by animal agriculture—an industry whose impact on greenhouse gases and climate change, according to a 2006 United Nations report, is greater than all forms of transportation combined—they also demonstrate a concern for the planet that goes above and beyond just being vegan. Maybe I’m biased, but I doubt you’d find such environmental awareness and sensitivity in restaurants that serve meat. I think we veg*ns just care more about the planet. After all, that’s one reason why many people turn to the veg diet in the first place.
HappyCow has grown consistently since its founding in 1999, but the most explosive growth has been in the last few years, coinciding with the explosive growth in the plant-food movement.
The restaurants in this volume range from upscale, gourmet vegan dining establishments, like Sublime in Fort Lauderdale, to small, fast-but-healthy-food joints like Buddha Burgers in Tel Aviv, which makes food deliveries by bicycle. What they have in common, beyond their commitment to vegan food and a healthy planet, is the enthusiastic support of members of the HappyCow community.
HappyCow has grown consistently since its founding in 1999, but the most explosive growth has been in the last few years, coinciding with the explosive growth in the plant-food movement. Maybe we’ll one day approach a tipping point, a time when veg*n concerns become mainstream concerns, when even vegan restaurants become commonplace, and when vegan world travelers will find a plethora of dining options everywhere they turn. We’re not there yet. In the meantime, let’s celebrate these remarkable vegan restaurants that someday may be hailed as pioneers. Try their recipes, and by all means visit their establishments and enjoy!
—Eric Brent
founder and director of HappyCow