The Megan Thee scallion bagel is smeared with cashew cream cheese and topped with carrot “lox” (smoky slivers of carrot), salty olives and fresh tomato. With nearly a dozen vendors selling vegetarian and vegan offerings, the Sunday food market is the perfect place for a good old-fashioned food crawl. Think of Smorgasburg as a plant-based paradise complete with vintage shopping and clean restrooms. This is a meal best enjoyed with others, but even alone, the act of ripping off pieces of injera and using them to swipe up ginger, garlic and turmeric-laced stew is comforting on any level. Served alongside the platter is a large, crispy sambussa filled with berbere-spiked lentils. They are all wildly different but with a single throughline: regardless of the spice, the flavors are concentrated and vibrant. A scoop of various stews are all neatly lined up on the bread creating a mosaic of colors: cabbage stew, whole lentil stew, split lentil stew, split pea stew, string beans with carrots, zucchini stew, chopped kale, chopped tomato with jalapeño and garlic and sunflower seed mixed with injera. The platter is served on a tire-sized piece of injera, the slightly sour-tinged springy flatbread made from teff that serves as both your plate and your utensil. The vegan feast combination is indeed a feast, and the best way to sample most of the menu. When she opened two decades ago, she wanted to highlight actual produce, putting together a plant-based menu of mostly stewed vegetables. You won’t find any alternative proteins on the menu at Rahel Woldmedhin’s restaurant in Little Ethiopia. Enjoy with a beer or a nitro cold brew under the cursive pink neon: “Be Excellent to each other.” (It’s what Bill and Ted would do.) To complement the 30-plus beers on tap, they cook up some of the neighborhood’s most playful items: panko-coated Korean-inspired croquettes filled with creamy mashed potatoes and kimchi carne asada fries, where braised seitan replaces steak and cashews form the sour cream sliders beefy with Impossible patties topped with coconut-based cheese and a very Taco Bell-esque “Munchwrap,” where Impossible ground “meat,” shredded lettuce, cashew crema, a tostada shell and more get stuffed and folded neatly into a tortilla, then grilled. The San Diego-founded brewery and coffee roastery - with locations in Anaheim and Santa Barbara, among others - serves a full food menu at the Dankness Dojo downtown, where the staff can get weird with their fermentations. Part experimental brewery, part all-vegan gastropub, Modern Times’ Los Angeles outpost is a neon-tinged, 1980s-nostalgia-bedecked restaurant that reimagines bar food classics as entirely plant-based.
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