Valentine’s Day has just passed and I hope you enjoyed it if you celebrated. Lisa and I did by booking lunch at our local cafe for their special Vegan Valentine’s menu, which included an obscene dessert platter complete with edible flowers and vegan whipped cream (see photo above).
The server, who we’ve become friendly with over the last year, complained that the event was making her feel more single than ever. I joked that Lisa and I would endeavour to ‘tone it down a bit’ out of respect, but I suspect the ‘Self Love Club’ stickers that they had put out on every table was her doing.
The reason we like this cafe is not just because it’s hidden away by a river in the middle of the countryside about 30 minutes drive from where we live, but because they don’t lead with the fact that they are predominantly plant-based. This means that the place is full of people who you wouldn’t normally see eating plant-based food; many probably didn’t realise that there was no meat and little dairy on the menu until, well, they got the menu.
And sometimes you have to take that approach to get people to engage. Lisa and I were once eating in a more obviously vegan cafe and someone knocked on the door. I opened it, as I was sat next to it, and a man put his head around and asked “we’re not vegan, is it OK if we eat here?”. I practically grabbed him by the elbow and dragged him in!
Making plant-based the default, rather than the leading message, is undoubtedly the reason our local cafe is usually full. By the time people get to the spread of fully-vegan cakes for dessert, they have probably forgotten any initial concerns they had. As I always say, if you have a vegan business that is just selling to vegans, you have kind of missed the point of having a vegan business in the first place.
David 💚🐷🌍
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