LA Vegan Chain Abruptly Shutters All Locations After Angry Vegan Mob Attacks Owner For Adding Meat to Menu in Desperate Bid to Stay in Business

A Los Angeles-based vegan restaurant chain abruptly shut down all of its locations after angry vegans attacked the company for adding meat to its menu.

After 14 years, Sage Vegan Bistro was struggling to stay in business so they added meat to their menu in an effort to rebrand and keep their doors open.

However, angry vegans lashed out at the restaurant for adding animal proteins to its menu and destroyed it with negative online reviews on Yelp and Instagram.

Vegans left thousands of negative comments online and accused the restaurant’s chef/owner of “making cruel choices,” and “gaslighting customers.”

Sage’s chef/owner, Mollie Engelhart, even sold her Los Angeles home to keep her vegan restaurant chain open, but it still wasn’t enough.

The online vegan mob celebrated the company’s demise with one commenter saying, “This is a great day for animals. One less butcher shop posing as a restaurant in town.”

SFGATE reported:

For about 13 years, Sage was known as Sage Vegan Bistro (rather than its final name, Sage Regenerative Kitchen), and was a leader in the plant-based casual restaurant space, with multiple locations across Southern California. But in the spring of 2024, Engelhart announced a shift in direction for the brand, with plans to “focus on sourcing and proselytizing regenerative farming practices,” wrote the Los Angeles Times.

That meant many things, Engelhart promised, including the addition of animal proteins to the restaurant’s menus. Longtime and avowed-vegan customers were not happy.

Thousands took to Instagram and Yelp at the time to voice their displeasure. Engelhart, whose father is Matthew Engelhart of Café Gratitude and Gracias Madre — both famed California vegan restaurants — was undeterred. “People are still eating meat everywhere I look,” she said in April, according to the LA Times. “Where can you go get high-quality meat that was raised in a way that is reversing climate change rather than causing climate change?”

Sage’s mindset shift was jarring to longtime customers but not totally unexpected. The Los Angeles vegan food scene had been rocked already as prominent plant-based operators such as Hot Tongue Pizza and Burgerlords shifted toward meat for a variety of reasons — often financial. For Engelhart, who also operates a restaurant and regenerative farm in Texas, the move was ideological as well as economic.

The post LA Vegan Chain Abruptly Shutters All Locations After Angry Vegan Mob Attacks Owner For Adding Meat to Menu in Desperate Bid to Stay in Business appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.