How Slutty Vegan Puts the Party in Plant-Based Food
Pinky Cole’s Atlanta-based burger chain is valued at a hundred million dollars. Can racy branding take vegan food mainstream?
Pinky Cole says most of her customers are meat-eaters and “we like it that way.” Photographs by Ross Landenberger for The New Yorker
On a recent Saturday evening at the flagship branch of Slutty Vegan, an Atlanta-based burger chain, a hulking former strip-club bouncer was working the door, under a bright sign that read “eat plants ya slut.” A dozen people were queued up outside. Another employee, wearing a T-shirt with the restaurant’s name in the style of Run DMC’s logo, shouted through a microphone as each customer stepped forward, “It’s Slutty Saturday!” If the person was a first-time patron, and admitted it, the employee added, “Virgin slut!”
Inside, a d.j. positioned near a rack of merch was playing Drake and Aaliyah at discothèque decibel levels. Three white guys in their late twenties—virgin sluts, all of them—peered up at the menu placard, which included such burgers as the Fussy Hussy (vegan cheese, caramelized onions; $13), the Super Slut (guacamole, jalapeños; $15), and the Ménage à Trois (vegan bacon, vegan shrimp; $19). All were made with plant-based patties from Impossible Foods and doused with a spicy orange “slut sauce.”
“We love meat,” one of the guys said. “We were debating going to a barbecue, but he”—he gestured at his friend—“really wanted to be called a slut today.”
In recent years, proponents of plant-based eating have gone to creative lengths to counter veganism’s reputation as preachy and abstemious. Michelin-starred restaurants such as Eleven Madison Park, in New York, have tried to sell customers on the idea that even all-veggie tasting menus can be worth the price of a month’s rent. At the other end of the scale, substitute-meat brands have made inroads into the fast-food industry: there are now Impossible Whoppers at Burger King and Beyond Meat sausage links in supermarket freezer aisles. But perhaps no establishment has done as much as Slutty Vegan to challenge the perception that a vegan diet is by and for pleasureless people.
The company’s founder and C.E.O., Pinky Cole, is thirty-five years old, with waist-length pink ombré dreadlocks. She wears a necklace with the word “vegan” and a marijuana leaf encrusted in diamonds. Her entrepreneurial streak dates back to her youth in Baltimore, when she and a high-school friend would buy McChickens for a dollar and sell them to their classmates for two. Cole estimates that three-quarters of Slutty Vegan’s customers are meat-eaters. “We like it that way,” she told me recently. “It’s not a vegan concept where we’re this glorified group that’s better than everybody else.” Though plant-based, a Slutty Vegan burger is not exactly health food. Cole declined to share nutritional information with me, but said, “I won’t sit here and tell you to eat Slutty Vegan every single day, all day. But I do want you to understand that veganism can be healthier, even if it starts with burgers and fries.”