Basking in a Vegan Caribbean at Aunts et Uncles in Brooklyn

Plant-based menus have become the new hubs of culinary creativity, and this bright all-day cafe offers plenty.

New ideas are bubbling up faster in vegan restaurants than in any other kind of kitchen right now. People who can’t see this are looking in the wrong places. They’re probably used to seeing creative leaps that started in kitchens that function as research laboratories, like Noma in the last decade and El Bulli before that, and then trickled down to other restaurants.

But vegan cooking isn’t trickling down. It’s trickling up. First it was a fringe diet, then a grass-roots movement. Those roots were eventually fertilized by ad campaigns from animal-rights groups. Now that well-funded companies including Impossible Foods, Beyond Meat and Tyson Foods have “plant-based” products to push, veganism has a marketing budget PETA never dreamed of. Restaurants can’t lead this movement. They can barely keep up.

Often, the owners and chefs of the new crop of plant-based restaurants are themselves fairly recent converts. Many seem to come out of nowhere or, more accurately, to come from establishments that nobody would describe as being on the cutting edge of cuisine. They’re not especially interested in originality for its own sake, a core value for chefs working in the fine-dining idiom. They’re original by necessity, because they’re inventing food for appetites that didn’t exist five years ago.