Where Vegan Restaurants Are Disappearing — and What Their Closures Mean

A neighborhood refuge closes

Mad Rabbit Cafe was more than a place to eat for its regulars. The fully vegan Madison restaurant gave its owner and customers a sense of community, and offered a rare space for people whose values centered on animal welfare.

At its final Sunday brunch, the cafe served tofu scramble and rotating crepe specials. Its closure leaves a gap in a city where the number of fully vegan restaurants has fallen from four when Mad Rabbit opened in early 2024 to one or two, depending on how they are counted. The clearly all-vegan option is a food-court-style stall.

A wider retreat in listings

A Vegan Society report said HappyCow listed 1,717 all-vegan restaurants in the US in October 2025. The count had reached 1,509 by the time of the report. Several prominent establishments also announced closures in 2025 and 2026, including Modern Love and Candle in New York City, the Vegan Joint in Los Angeles, and Millennium in Oakland. Millennium later reopened in a leaner form.

The cost of running a cafe

Mad Rabbit owner Nate Anger said the business was profitable in each of its three years, but did not earn enough to make its workload worthwhile. Running the cafe had taken over his life, he said, and kept him from family activities.

Anger described missing his children’s baseball games, tournaments and school band recitals. His experience illustrates one pressure on independent restaurants: a business can bring in a profit and still demand more time than its owner can afford to give.

Plant-based food beyond vegan spots

The article describes animal-rights activism as encompassing both distress over factory farming and the pleasure of finding satisfying alternatives. All-vegan restaurants can make that latter experience especially tangible; Krupa Panchal, co-owner of the vegan Indian restaurant Bombay Food Junkies near St. Louis, called one such place “a little heaven.”

At the same time, plant-based options have become more mainstream at restaurants that are not fully vegan. The account suggests that these broader menus coexist with a contraction in dedicated vegan businesses, though it does not explain how much one trend has affected the other.