Chefs and operators on creating a best-selling plant-based menu

For Irina Linovich, founder of vegan restaurant Holy Carrot in Knightsbridge, London, attracting a wide audience for her dishes involves a simple starting point: delicious food.

"Many of our guests are not vegan and I'm happy to say I think around 50% of people just come because they love the food," she says.

Ensuring no one feels excluded by the language is also key. "We want everyone to come to the restaurant and feel welcome," she says. "Our restaurant is fully vegan, but when I give interviews or we do marketing I love speaking about what we do as ‘plant-based', because it's close to my heart in terms of inclusivity."

The restaurant has also teamed up with the documentary film makers of Seaspiracy and Cowspiracy to create a themed menu.

During Veganuary last month, Holy Carrot created a ‘meaty' four-course menu that included ‘steak tartare' with oxheart tomato. For each menu purchased, a 20% donation went to the makers of Cowspiracy. "That kind of collaboration helps us to spread the word about the product… and what ingredients you can use instead of meat and fish."

The right messaging

Liam Nelson, co-founder of Italian restaurant Pastaio in Soho, London, has created a separate plant-based menu for the restaurant that includes four antipasti dishes, five pasta options, a dessert and a sorbet.

"The idea was for guests to have a menu in front of them where they know they can eat everything," he says. "When we launched the green menu two years ago, one of the biggest surprises was just how vocal plant-based consumers [can be]. If you get them on your side, the snowball effects can just be incredible." Pastaio also readdressed its wine offering to ensure it was vegan-friendly.

"That focus on the experience and keeping it very positive for the consumer was also a really important bit of marketing. Because it felt easy, people felt happy to recommend us because the experience when they came to the restaurant wasn't difficult and fraught."

South Asian-inspired Ka Pao in Glasgow and Edinburgh has a strong plant-based presence on its menu, with nine out of 27 dishes vegan. However, Sandy Browning, executive chef, says it's made a conscious effort not to promote the vegan dishes too overtly. "We just push it forward as a great dish that we have spent a lot of time on and that we want people to enjoy."

One of the biggest sellers is the charcoal-grilled celeriac, almond and turmeric curry, which uses fermented soybean instead of fish sauce. "We wanted to get away from using a fake vegan fish sauce… giving it that umami and depth to make it much heartier."

But getting staff on board with flavours and products can be just as important as winning consumers over, says Ruth Carpenter, head of marketing at Pizza Pilgrims. The business decided to develop its own plant-based ‘Notzarella' and ‘Ve-Du-Ya' cheese and meat alternatives after failing to find the right quality off-the-shelf products.

"Our team are the biggest selling point. If they get behind products, they fly off the shelves. When we launched Ve-Du-Ya, for example, we did a blind tasting with all our pizza chefs," says Carpenter. "We have chefs from Nepal and they're very traditional. [They like] big, hearty, meaty flavours and lots of cheese, so having a plant-based meat product for them... let's just say it probably wouldn't have gone down that well if they had known what we were doing."

The chefs were initially told they were trying out a new nduja supplier. "When they learned it wasn't a meat product, they couldn't believe it. And it just went to cement the fact that we knew that it was a good alternative.

"We've signposted it on the menu and we have influencers in. We still do all the traditional digital marketing campaigns around it, but really, it's all about the team and they love it, so they very much sell it for us. Easy, job done!"

Plant-based pays

David Moore, founder of fine dining institution Pied à Terre, jokes the restaurant is "a bit of a dinosaur", having been founded in 1991. But during that time, it has successfully adapted to trends, introducing a strong vegan offering under chef Asimakis Chaniotis, as well as launching a Vegan Feast Home Delivery during lockdown.

"Going vegan was a pragmatic move – there's less to spoil," he says. "In terms of transport, we are a little bit lighter on our toes because we don't have to worry too much about temperature control – a couple of ice packs are fine. And it was a new angle – you don't stay around for 31 years without looking for the next new angle, and I think it's served me well."

Plant-based dining "is the way forward," he adds. "But we're not going to give up on the regular menu. For me, it's all about inclusiveness… in Veganuary our menu was 50:50 [plant-based to meat and dairy], but we do see about one-third [of plant-based] on a regular basis."

Sophie McCready, head of marketing at Benugo, agrees that plant-based dishes are becoming increasingly important to the chain, and it's made some of those switches easier by not charging for plant-based milk. When choosing which non-dairy milk to choose, it looked at all options and decided on oat milk as, "it's probably the best of all them," McCready says. Currently non-diary milk makes up about 17% of milk used; however, the most popular food item remains the ham and cheese baguette. For McCready, the important point is to create a "balance" in the offering, rather than taking items away.

Chantelle Nicholson opened London restaurant Apricity in London in April 2022, with a focus on low waste and sustainability. "Our menu is probably 50% plant-based and our sales are about 58% plant-based," she says.

However, Nicholson cautions against thinking about plant-based offerings as necessarily the cheaper option: "While the actual food cost might be lower, the labour cost is higher, which means the price point should pretty much be even with meat. If you take a steak that comes in from the butcher, you literally season it and put it on the grill and it's done. Whereas with a plant-based dish there's so many different layers and steps, it'll probably take 10 times the amount of labour. That's why plant-based dishes shouldn't necessarily be cheaper and I think that's the wrong message to give sometimes."

Kirk Haworth, chef and co-founder of plant-based restaurant in London, Plates, agrees. The business also runs events and helps design plant-based menus for other organisations.

"Basically, how do we get customers to understand the level of detail and layers of work that we have to put in, that you wouldn't have to do if it was a perfectly cooked piece of turbot, or a piece of meat? I hope they feel that when they eat it."

He says that because it can also be a more experimental way of cooking, there is a time and ingredient cost attached when trying to get a dish right. "It's very tricky – there is a lot of failure in plant-based cooking because you're basically learning, but that's also what's super-exciting about it. There's so much to explore and so many doors to open."

For anyone looking to get started in this space, Moore advises just getting stuck in. "Dive in, do it – there's no downside. Start off with a couple of dishes, put them on the menu and they will sell. You will increase your business, you will be more inclusive and you will be more profitable."

Nicholson agrees: "It's a balance and every business is different. I think if you don't have the skillsets, then start small, do a couple of dishes, wait for confidence and interest to grow, and hopefully it will become more of the norm. But I think for anyone who doesn't have those options right now, from a business perspective, I would be concerned."

The power of influencers

Food influencers can be a fantastic way for operators to get their name out there as a plant-based destination. "We use influencers across everything we do, but I think the plant-based ones, if you really get them on your side, the incredible impact that can have is really surprising," says Nelson of Pastaio.

He advises taking a collaborative approach and being respectful of people's time. "My advice would be if you're going to work with influencers, to really appreciate that this is their business. And if you are not going to pay them – it's very rare that we do pay them, but we have – it is important that you're adding value to them."

That means being upfront about not necessarily expecting content and looking at ways to work together if they like your plant-based dining experience. "We also do quite a lot of collaborations, so we will allow them to do a competition to their followers for a meal for two or a meal for four at the restaurant."

Linovich of Holy Carrot has worked with influencers since opening. Overall, digital marketing has been an important part of her strategy, having grown the Instagram account to more the 24,000 followers in less than two years. The restaurant doesn't pay influencers, but has worked with some big names, such as Lucy Watson, who has 1.1 million followers on Instagram. "It's helped us a lot to grow awareness about the brand. We will rely on influencers a lot in our 2023 strategy," she says.

Browning of Ka Pao agrees. "You do see the benefits straight away – some people would never have come to our restaurant if it wasn't for influencers. And some influencers come back and spend money. For us, that's always a good sign."

"Influencers can be an important part of our marketing strategy, providing you work with the right people," adds Ruth Carpenter, head of marketing at Pizza Pilgrims. "We've been lucky to work with some great people. It's driven by our PR team, mainly. We are focused on looking at TikTok influencers and their video content and working with the right people to attract a specific demographic, which we feel that, looking at our data, is a customer set we are lacking in."