Vegan no more: a beloved Asheville plant-based cafe pivots to stay afloat post-hurricane | Food

One day in October, a trailer with an unusual delivery pulled up outside Rosetta’s Kitchen, a beloved vegan restaurant in downtown Asheville, North Carolina.

The contents: 1,500lbs of donated frozen meat, destined for area residents eating free meals at the restaurant after Hurricane Helene battered the region in late September.

That delivery signaled the end of an era for the 22-year old eatery known for its tempeh Reuben sandwich with house-fermented sauerkraut; “tempalo” wings with a vegan ranch sauce; and the “family favorite” plate with peanut butter tofu, sauteed kale and smashed potatoes. When the restaurant reopened for regular service on 21 November, feta cheese was in one of the dishes.

Its owner, Rosetta Buan, who goes by Rosetta Star, confirmed that the restaurant will continue serving donated meat and dairy products if it allows it to feed people in need. The change was also to increase the restaurant’s chances of surviving the post-hurricane downturn.

“I’ve never been more afraid of losing my company as a business owner,” she said. “The restaurant is on very unstable financial ground right now.”

On its worst day, Rosetta’s made $600 to $1,000, far from the $4,000 to $6,000 it typically earned on a busy day in a normal year. She estimated that the business has lost anywhere between $160,000 to $190,000 in gross revenues since September. Asheville’s usually bustling downtown is “a ghost town right now” without the tourists and faithful locals who typically patronize her business, she says. Yet her $6,400 rent is still due every month.

Many customers understood and supported Buan’s decision to serve dairy and meat. “Thank you for always being a place for terrific vegan food in Asheville, and thank you for always having your ‘everybody eats’ policy,” wrote Mary Broadwell, referring to the restaurant’s practice of serving a pinto beans and rice plate free to anyone, no questions asked.

For some, however, the news was a dealbreaker. “Let us know if/when you return to all-Vegan,” wrote one Facebook user, Pamela Caroline. A handful of people posted one-star reviews on Google. Among them was Ave Strait, who shared that Rosetta’s was once their favorite restaurant, but is no longer. “I’m a firm believer that animals aren’t menu items,” they posted.

Buan said: “I understand the disappointment of some vegans who liked that we were a totally safe place.” But she notes there are now far more vegan eateries in the city than there were when she opened decades ago. She also has her staff’s full consent and no tolerance for “bullies” who have called her a sellout.

Buan’s situation epitomizes the challenges facing Asheville’s restaurants post-Helene, as they try to balance helping their community and surviving as a business. Rosetta’s started serving free vegetarian and vegan meals to community members on 30 September, two days after Helene devastated much of western North Carolina.

Mutual aid has been a large part of the restaurant’s history. In March 2003, Buan closed the restaurant to take free food to demonstrations that erupted downtown when the US invaded Iraq. In 2016 and 2017, she and her children served activists at the Standing Rock reservation during protests against the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline.

To feed Asheville residents after Helene, the restaurant teamed up with Grassroots Aid Partnership (GAP), a non-profit that provides resources and logistical support to community initiatives. “We had a big enough walk-in, big enough freezer, enough people, enough gumption,” Buan said. Rosetta’s quickly became a drop-off point for other restaurants, farms and charities that arrived with inventory or donations.

Buan estimated that her staff served as many as 850 to 1,000 meals a day at their peak after the storm. Even before the trailer from the non-profit Pulling for Veterans rolled up with nearly a ton of meat, she had already accepted a case of bison meat that a friend brought up from Charleston.

“What am I supposed to say? No?” Buan said. “I’m too practical for that.”

The restaurant is using separate grills, fryers and utensils to avoid cross contamination. “We’re treating it as an allergen,” she said.

For some vegans in Rosetta’s customer base, however, that separation is not enough. “They don’t see food. They see victims,” said Joe Walsh, a longtime Asheville vegan.

He believes that Buan could have fed people throughout the storm without resorting to meat. He helped unload a donation of 9,000 meatless Impossible burgers, and he also observed that other local vegan restaurants such as Plant have consistently served free or pay-what-you-can meals since the storm. “I’ll probably still eat there,” Walsh said, adding: “I’m glad that any restaurant has vegan items.”

Craig Tracy, who has been vegan for nine years and also briefly worked at Rosetta’s , willingly served meat when he and his partner volunteered at a Rosetta’s food truck in west Asheville.

“I see the good in Rosetta and how quick she was to respond after Helene, to get out there and help feed people,” he said. While he feels “really sad” and “a little disappointed” about her decision to keep serving meat, he recently dined there to support the restaurant.

Like a number of local establishments that have reopened, Rosetta’s is operating with limited hours and a limited menu. Staff are a combination of restaurant workers and GAP volunteers. “I don’t have money to pay my employees,” Buan said.

The restaurant is currently relying almost completely on financial support from non-profits like GAP and BeLoved Asheville. Buan has only received $2,500 in disaster assistance from various small business loans and grants.

Meghan Rogers, the executive director of the Asheville Independent Restaurants (AIR) association, said: “The loss of revenue or income during what should have been our busiest quarter, leaf season through the holidays, is really the primary concern because that is the revenue that both the restaurants and the employees use to then sustain themselves and pay their bills through the winter months.”

That money will likely not be recouped via state or federally funded business grants and forgivable loans. Congress has not yet replenished the coffers of the Small Business Administration disaster loan program, which ran out of money in mid-October. Additionally, North Carolina Republicans recently overrode Governor Roy Cooper’s veto to push through a bill that purports to offer disaster relief but does not allocate any money to the region.

Insurance has not helped much, either: preliminary data from the national Independent Restaurant Coalition found that 40% of claims submitted in the wake of Helene have been denied and 43% not yet processed as of 27 November. While that data included other areas, 95% of survey respondents came from Buncombe county, where Asheville is located.

This isn’t the first time that Rosetta’s Kitchen has pivoted to survive. Raised vegetarian by hippie parents in neighboring McDowell county, Buan originally planned for a predominantly vegetarian menu when she launched the restaurant in 2002. “I never was a vegan myself,” she said. But soon after opening, she hired staff from a vegan restaurant that had just closed. She credits them with expanding Rosetta’s vegan offerings. Walsh, the longtime Rosetta’s patron, recalled those earliest days when the restaurant was one of the few vegan options available, describing it as “like Cheers, except with healthier food”.

And when many restaurants closed during the pandemic, Rosetta’s, which was then mostly vegetarian with some vegetarian options, leaned even more toward vegan food to keep the business afloat. “Our clientele plummeted so much that keeping cheese and dairy – because they’re perishable – became silly because we didn’t sell much of it,” she said.

Tracy, the former Rosetta’s worker, has watched vegetarian and vegan restaurants come and go in Asheville. But if a place that has existed as long as Rosetta’s closes, he worries it might be a canary in the coal mine for Asheville’s vibrant restaurant scene.

“That would be a very scary indicator of our local economy,” he said.

Buan is not giving up, though. She’s looking to expand production and distribution of Rosetta’s Kitchen’s boxed tofu and veggie burgers. She’s collaborating with Mother Earth Foods, a company that delivers customizable farm boxes, on a grant that may result in the restaurant becoming a non-profit.

“We will either reinvent ourselves, or we’ll go out in a blaze of free food and doing good,” she said, “because I don’t see a mathematical trajectory to survival without changing”.