The IMPROBABLE RISE and FIZZLING OUT of VEGANISM

MEAT'S BACK ON THE MENU.

- BY RACHEL SUGAR

THE PLAN HAD BEEN TO MEET the vegan chef and cookbook author Isa Chandra Moskowitz at one of her old haunts for dinner, but the problem was none of them was left. “That scrambled-tofu heyday is gone. I can’t think of a single fucking place to get tempeh, except, like, maybe Wild Ginger,” she told me, referring to the mid-aughts Pan-Asian mini-chain. You could have gotten it at Modern Love, her vegan comfort spot in Williamsburg, but even she had closed up shop. On the bright side, she was newly available to meet me at 5 p.m. on a Tuesday.

Moskowitz is not a conventional celebrity, but she is extraordinarily famous to an extraordinarily small number of people. Mainly, vegans. Specifically, vegans in or rapidly approaching middle age. As a vegan of increasingly middle-aged experience, I found this assessment unsettling. She officially gave up meat at 15 and discovered both veganism and leftist politics through the New York City punk scene of the late '80s. Her culinary history is a portrait of a city that no longer exists. As a teenage high-school dropout, she learned to butcher broccoli and make soups taste good while cooking for Food Not Bombs in the East Village, and though she went on to work in professional kitchens, she stayed true to her anarchist-punk DIY roots. The Post Punk Kitchen, her gleefully low-budget cooking show on Brooklyn Community Access Television, led to an ever-growing canon of voice-y vegan cookbooks, which made way for the restaurant. She opened Modern Love in Omaha, where she happened to be living, in 2014, then two years later she opened a second one on Union Avenue in Williamsburg. Then both restaurants closed. Omaha went first, at the end of 2024; six months later, she shuttered Brooklyn.