Vegetarian Restaurants and the LGBTQ+ Movement

It’s tempting for the media to measure the strength of LGBTQ+ communities by the rise and fall of gay bars. Gay bars are dying. No, gay bars are rebounding. Gay bars are where we find safe space. No, they’re not. 

For 50 years, queer and trans folks have also found refuge in a different sort of gathering place: vegetarian and vegan restaurants. You don’t go to a vegan cafe to search out love or stumble your way into a night of messy joy. You settle in for conversation and a quinoa bowl with friends, whatever their gender or orientation. And it’s been that way since the 1970s, when lesbian feminists set out to reinvent the restaurant.

When Pat Hynes and her business partner, Gill Gane, transformed a grotty old bar in Cambridge, Massachusetts, into Bread & Roses in 1973, they wanted every aspect of the restaurant to express their feminist ideals. They built an open kitchen so cooks and customers could talk to each other, and filled the dining room with art and music by women. They banned tipping and asked customers to pick up their own food. During that year, Hynes came out as lesbian and met her life partner, Janice. She and Gane painted a labrys (a double-headed ax) on their front door — and Bread & Roses quickly became one of Cambridge’s prime lesbian hangouts.

More than 230 feminist restaurants and coffee houses like Bread & Roses opened in the 1970s and 1980s, writes Alex Ketchum in her 2023 book Ingredients for Revolution, a history of the movement. “The majority were owned, operated, and run by lesbians or queer women,” says Ketchum, a McGill University professor and an organizer of Boston’s Queer Food Conference.  

In city after city, women scraped together funds to open places with names like Mother Courage (New York City), the Brick Hut (Berkeley), and Grace and Ruby’s (Iowa City). Ketchum says many founders asked themselves, “How can we live out as lesbians? How can we live out our feminist values in our workplace? How can we support ourselves financially?” 

The fluidity of the spaces they created allowed bisexual and lesbian women to be out in public — in the daytime, away from boozy bars, gathering together with straight women and women who had not yet come out. 

At the same time, the darker impulses of 1970s and 1980s radical feminism made some feminist restaurants exclusionary. Some spaces banned male children over a certain age. Others, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s, proclaimed that they were spaces for “women-born women,” specifically barring transgender women. And while some feminist restaurants actively worked to create spaces where Black and brown women felt welcome, others blithely ignored racist dynamics. In an oral history recorded for the Lambda Archives in San Diego, Carlotta Hernandez tells the story of how she and two gay Chicana activists created a feminist coffee house called Las Hermanas in 1974 (signature dish: The Amazon, a pita sandwich stuffed with avocado, cheese, and salsa). As white women from wealthier backgrounds got involved, Hernandez says, they pushed out all three Latina founders. The coffeehouse closed shortly after.

Feminist cooking is vegetarian cooking

Bread & Roses thrived for four years on Cambridge’s small strip of feminist businesses, hosting meetings for lesbian motorcycle clubs and the National Organization for Women (NOW). After Hynes and Gane read Frances Moore Lappé’s 1971 bestselling book Diet for a Small Planet, which argued that we could eradicate global hunger if we stopped feeding valuable crops to meat animals, the cafe’s menu went mostly vegetarian. In fact, says Ketchum, most feminist restaurants did the same. As the collective behind Bloodroot Cafe in Bridgeport, Connecticut, explained in the introduction to their 1980 cookbook, The Political Palate: “Our food is vegetarian because we are feminists. We are opposed to the exploitation, domination, and destruction which come from factory farming and the hunter with the gun. We oppose the keeping and killing of animals for the pleasure of the palate just as we oppose men controlling abortion or sterilization.” 

In the era of “The personal is political,” vegetarianism was the political diet in America. Civil Rights activists like Dick Gregory emphasized the parallels between nonviolent resistance, racial justice, and vegetarianism. Inspired by Diet for a Small Planet, millions of young counterculture folks started food co-ops, organic farms, and collectively run vegetarian restaurants. The goal wasn’t just improving our health or reducing our ecological impact, but to build an anti-capitalist economy. 

The Gay Rights movement rose up alongside racial justice movements, feminism, and environmentalism. Many of these counterculture vegetarian restaurants, lesbian-owned or not, created spaces for LGBTQ+ people to work and eat. 

David Hirsch moved to Ithaca, New York, in 1973 with a group of gay men and lesbians to establish the Lavender Hill commune. He joined the kitchen collective of Moosewood Restaurant in 1976, a few years before it became a famous destination. “I knew it was going to be a friendly place on two levels: the fact that I could easily be out, and we shared politics and this sort of hippie cultural perspective,” Hirsch says. “The politics also [fostered] ways to relate to people in a work situation that were not ‘You’ll do what I say because I’m the boss.'” He credits this dynamic to the women working there. 

At first, Hirsch thought he was the only gay person on staff, but eventually, a quarter of the ownership collective’s 19 members, who ran the restaurant until selling it in 2022, were LGBTQ+. Hirsch, who co-wrote almost all of Moosewood’s cookbooks, kept cooking there until 2016.

The fluid welcome of vegetarian restaurants

The majority of LGBTQ+ restaurants that Erik Piepenburg chronicles in his forthcoming book, Dining Out, have been located in gayborhoods like Chicago’s Boystown or San Francisco’s Castro. With the exception of Bloodroot, still owned by founders Selma Miriam and Noelle Furie, none were explicitly vegetarian. What they have provided, he says, is a joyful sense of safety. “Something as simple as reaching for your date’s hand, or putting your arm around their shoulders — younger generations don’t know how fraught that was,” Piepenberg says. “In a gay restaurant, that wouldn’t turn a head.” 

I came out in the early 1990s, just as the lesbian feminist restaurants were dying off. But as I, a queer omnivore, have traveled the country, I have always sought out the comfort of vegetarian cafes. They might not have been LGBTQ+-owned, but they were the kind of place where I didn’t have to watch my words. Where I might pass a table of lesbians on my way back to the bathroom and we’d give each other the “family” smile, the one that says: I see you. As Nat Stratton-Clarke, owner of Seattle’s 33-year-old Cafe Flora, says, vegetarian restaurants have always been welcoming to “outsiders, to outcasts, to anybody who’s a little bit different.” 

There is no reliable data on whether queer and trans folks are more likely to be vegetarian or vegan. But vegetarian spaces emit a hazy leftwing aura that seems to repel people who don’t like what they stand for. According to a Gallup poll from 2018, 5% of Americans self-identify as vegetarian or vegan. Hidden within that figure is a wide political gap: According to the same poll, 11% of self-proclaimed “liberals” don’t eat meat, five times higher than “conservatives.” 

A new wave of homophobic and transphobic legislation has many people in the LGBTQ+ community on alert. So have violent attacks on restaurants, doughnut shops, and vegan bakeries holding drag events. “This year there have already been 550 anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ+ bills introduced around the country, 27 of which have been signed into law,” Stratton-Clarke says. “As a trans person and business owner, now more than ever I feel the urgency of creating safe spaces and for supporting the trans community in any way I can.” 

The BIPOC queer- and trans-owned vegan restaurants and cafes that have opened around the country — such as LesbiVeggies (Audubon, New Jersey), Jade Rabbit (Portland, Oregon), and Dulce Vegan Bakery (Atlanta) — are playing much the same role feminist restaurants did a half-century ago: Seeing food and hospitality as inseparable from their sense of mission. Operating on their own terms while welcoming in the broader world. 

Just like Bread & Roses’ Pat Hynes and Gill Gale, Little Barn Coffee House‘s owners, Joana Rubio and Seleste Diaz, were activists first and cooks second. The Los Angeles couple have been attending animal-rights actions since their teen years, and believe in the parallels between animal rights and social justice. 

When they opened their cafe in 2020, the couple made it clear to the press and the neighborhood that Little Barn is a queer Latina vegan restaurant. “When you come out proud and are strong about your voice, people have no other choice but to accept you,” Rubio says. 

In fact, the restaurant draws customers who reflect all of the communities that they represent. Last June, the Litas Los Angeles, a womxn’s motorcycle collective, gathered at Little Barn for vegan sausage biscuits and breakfast burritos. Then they roared off, en masse, to the Los Angeles Pride Parade.