VEGAN SOUL FOOD

VEGAN

Where to embrace Charlotte’s new dining sensation

After 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,

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.”

This page: At VeganTo-Go, owner Dee Hairston (above) serves vegan comforts like Fried Chix Tenders & Waffles. Opposite page: Chenelle Bragg (left) serves a soybased Nashville hot chicken sandwich at Best of Both Souls.

After she moved to Charlotte, Bragg worked in local restaurants and as a private chef before she opened Best of Both Souls. Her most popular menu item is a soy-based Nashville hot chicken sandwich served between two buttery (vegan) buns.

Of course, changing your own diet is one thing. Convincing others who were raised on Grandma’s down-home cookin’ on Sunday afternoons is another. But many vegan chefs say customers embrace the dishes once they try them. “I give them a sample, and they always order,” says Akil Courtney, owner and chef of Ve-Go food truck. Courtney bought the food truck in June 2019 and regularly parks outside local breweries, where he convinces meat eaters to try his wheat-based barbecue ribs and crabless crab cakes.

Most of Dee Hairston’s customers at Dee’s Vegan To-Go—about 80 percent—aren’t vegan, she says. They just like her food. Her jambalaya topped with Beyond Meat vegan sausage; coconut cream-based “Mac and Cheeze”; and stir-fry with “chicken” made from plant-based proteins are her most popular dishes. She fries the vegan chicken as she would real chicken, and adds a medley of herbs and spices to tofu to replace the bacon grease and salt pork that soul food chefs use to flavor meat.

DEE’S VEGAN TO-GO

1540 West Blvd., Ste. 100, 980.430.3856, deesvegantogo.com Don’t leave this takeout-only spot without one of Chef Dee’s baked goods. It’s a tasty treat after the spicy jambalaya.

BEST OF BOTH SOULS

2200 Thrift Road (inside the City Kitch building), 704.270.9998, bestofbothsouls.com This mostly takeout restaurant has some of Charlotte’s best Nashville hot chicken, vegan or not.

VE-GO FOOD TRUCK

Locations vary, 704.351.1928, ve-gofoodtruck.com Choose jerk “chicken,” calabash “shrimp” or country-fried “steak” at this food truck, which is usually parked outside one of Charlotte’s many breweries.

SOUL MINER’S GARDEN FOOD TRUCK

Locations vary, 704.713.5661, facebook.com/SoulMiners-Garden-FoodTruck-104391647840173

With temporary homes outside a number of regional breweries, this vegan food truck dishes up barbecue jackfruit sliders and collards without the bacon grease.

VEGGANERS LUCK

Locations vary, 310.867.9531, instagram.com/ vegganersluck/?hl=en This “ghost restaurant” is pop-up only, so follow it on Instagram to locate its vegan brisket and pecan pie.

VELTREE

7945 N. Tryon St., Ste. 110, 980.355.0075, facebook.com/ veltreevegan Good luck choosing between the “Not Popeye’s” sandwich and the vegan shrimp po’ boy sandwich at this University City spot.