VEGAN A
fter four years of hawking her vegan sweet potato spice cake and other plant-based dishes at the Charlotte Regional Farmers Market, Dee Hairston opened her first brick-and-mortar vegan restaurant, Dee’s Vegan To-Go, on West Boulevard, in December 2020. The St. Louis native serves homemade vegan comfort foods like Fried Chix Tenders & Waffles with vegan “chicken” tenders battered with coconut milk and seasoned flour, and Hearty Black Bean Chili with organic black beans and Beyond Beef. Hairston learned to cook traditional soul food from her mother and grandmother, and she picked up some techniques from a few semesters at Johnson & Wales and Central Piedmont Community College. But 11 years ago, she decided to drastically change her diet. She’d lost her mother, grandmother and two aunts within five years of each other, all from conditions that have often struck people of color through the decades: diabetes, heart failure and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Hairston, who grew up eating the same dishes they did, knew she was at risk, too. She began to swap out, for example, fried chicken for tofu and coconut milk for heavy cream. She gradually learned to make her own version of vegan soul food through trial and error and her beloved cookbook collection, which she’s built over 30 years. “I would practice, drill and rehearse,” she says. “Of course, my family was my guinea pig.” Instead of traditional, animal fat-laden Southern cuisine,
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W H E R E T R AVE LE R ® GU ESTBO O K
BY JARED MISNER Hairston landed on a health-conscious modification that’s catching on in Charlotte and other American cities. In 2020, in defiance of COVID’s vise-like grip on the restaurant industry, at least a half-dozen vegan comfort or vegan soul food restaurants, food trucks and pop-ups have opened in Charlotte. Black celebrities have helped spread the word about vegan cuisine’s benefits. Serena Williams, Erykah Badu and Colin Kaepernick often post about their plant-based diets on social media. It figures that the enthusiasm has spread to restaurant owners: In the first months of the pandemic, more vegan restaurants opened in the United States (517) than closed (413), according to a summer 2020 report in the online restaurant guide HappyCow. Chenelle Bragg, who opened Best of Both Souls in the Wesley Heights neighborhood in September, is another one of these pioneering chefs. Bragg, 43, grew up in Detroit but as a child ate Sunday dinners at the home of her maternal grandmother, a native of Meridian, Mississippi. The food was pure Southern— fried chicken, collard greens with fatback, black-eyed peas, chitlins—and she retained some of her eating habits into adulthood. But a diverticulitis diagnosis convinced her to think harder about what she ate, and she soon discovered that a plant-based diet helped control her flare-ups. “Soul food, to me, is when you’re cooking from yourself,” she says. “You’re cooking with love, you’re cooking with passion, and it’s food that’s good for yourself.”
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Where to embrace Charlotte’s new dining sensation
