Vegan Restaurant Closures: Cooked or Cooking?
It's not the closures you need to worry about
If you’re anything like me, you probably have a favorite vegan restaurant. If you’re very much like me, your favorite is your favorite because your old favorite closed down. This comports with the popular understanding: vegan restaurants are always struggling and closing down.
From chatting with people, it also just sorta “feels like” there are fewer and fewer vegan restaurants. A recent article in GrubStreet, “How Veganism Got Cooked“, attempts to narrativize the situation with an NYC focus. As I write this the story is #1 on their site, far above a story on a shrimp-focused restaurant doing well.
Sure, these are the feelings, but what’s actually going on? I used OpenStreetMap data and examined entries to determine if they are restaurants and whether they are vegan restaurants, specifically. I analyzed a total of 18,103 restaurants in four cities: New York City, San Francisco, Portland, Berlin1; detecting 3,758 closures overall. The data was captured on Jan 1 of each year, starting with 2019 and continuing to the year of this publication, 2026. For these analyses, you’ll note that they begin in 2020: this is because for there to be a change, you must have previous data to compare it to, thus the first year with a valid comparison is 20202.
At first blush, it would seem we’ve seen the beginnings of a collapse of the vegan restaurant industry in the past couple years, but the situation is actually far odder than that. This year, we’ve seen fewer vegan restaurants close than non-vegan ones, percentage-wise! That should be excellent news! Somehow, they’re holding on admirably well, despite everything.
But if they’re not actually closing more often than before, what’s going on? Why does it still feel like there are fewer vegan restaurants? From the data it is clear that the issue is that there are fewer new restaurants opening. In fact, there are so few new ones that we have dropped below replacement, meaning that the number of total vegan restaurants decreased between 2025 and 2026. However, a similarly-sized decrease was observed between 2023 and 2024 that corrected between 2024 and 2025.
Why might this be? There are several possibilities. If you have your own hypothesis, please drop it in the comments section below, but here are the main reasons I can think of:
Investor skepticism
Restaurateur fear
Restaurateur fatigue from previous, failed restaurants
Lower population of vegans to become restaurateurs
It is difficult to disentangle these. We have seen reports that the number of vegans in the US (sorry, Berlin, Germany) has decreased over time. This could lead to all but #3 in the list above. Someone who’s willing to dig into this further will have a big job ahead of them. Luckily I am a shallow diver and my work here is done.3
City-by-city graphs:
and raw population trends start at 2020 as well for ease of understanding the charts and for symmetry
Limitations:
Cities are defined by their north/east/south/west extents. This may slightly exclude or include restaurants that aren’t quite within the true boundaries. I think this is more or less fine. Were this a research paper, I’d probably ensure I had good KMLs of the true boundaries. Another issue that might be here is if for some reason OSM had poor coverage of a city that improved over time, which might look like restaurant growth without actually being growth. I used large cities that already had excellent coverage to account for this. It’s likely that I’ve under-counted vegan restaurants, given that the way I identify them is by using OSM’s listings, but I’ve done the best I can reasonably do!
User likethus on Reddit had a good point, noting that OSM might systematically undercount closures and correctly count openings since people might be more enthusiastic about adding cool new places than removing old places. I agree that this is a limitation that could be skewing results. Unfortunately I don't have a better way of checking this with the data I have access to (without paying Google money, and still that wouldn't be guaranteed to be accurate). I'm hoping my use of big cities might help deal with this.
See their comment thread here: https://www.reddit.com/r/vegan/comments/1qcojdx/comment/nzmjwt5
I have no research to back this up, but I would *imagine* the sample size of "vegan restaurants" vs "non-vegan restaurants" are vastly different by at least one or two if not more orders of magnitude. That may be why it *feels like* all the vegan places are closing - think of it like if you take one away from 100 options, its way more noticeable than taking one away from 10,000 options.