Where did all the vegan restaurants go?

My favorite restaurant, here in Madison, Wisconsin, closed this week.

It was not my favorite because it had the greatest food I’d ever had, nor the most memorable ambiance.

But I loved the Mad Rabbit Cafe because it had become my anchor in the neighborhood — it felt like home to me and a core group of friends as surely as the century-old houses lining the surrounding city blocks.

Most importantly, it was entirely vegan — a rarity in this city, which, despite its ultra-progressive politics, embraces Wisconsin’s identity as “America’s Dairyland.” It was a refuge where my most closely held values found expression.

That closure is part of a national trend .

US plant-based restaurants appear to be going through a contraction, amid the tumultuous aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic and, perhaps, an anti-plant-based cultural vibe shift.

VegNews magazine reported that data from HappyCow , an app that lists vegan and vegetarian restaurants, finds the number of vegan restaurants in three of the country’s top destinations for vegan dining — New York City, Los Angeles, and Portland, Oregon — decreased by between 21 and 25 percent from 2022 to late 2024.

Those cities alone make up a significant share of America’s vegan restaurants.

Then, in 2025 and 2026, some of the country’s most renowned, long-running plant-based restaurants also announced that they’d shut down: Modern Love and Candle in New York City, the Vegan Joint in LA, Millennium in Oakland, a more than three-decade-old institution (though it later reopened as a leaner operation), among many others .

According to a Vegan Society report , in October 2025, HappyCow (which is like Yelp but for plant-based dining) listed 1,717 all-vegan restaurants in the US.

As of this writing, HappyCow lists 1,509.

Madison has never had anything like the vegan riches of New York or San Francisco, but even we are having our own vegan recession.

When Mad Rabbit opened in early 2024, the city had four fully vegan restaurants; now, depending on how you count, one or two remain (and even the one that’s unambiguously vegan is a food-court-style stall).

I visited Mad Rabbit at its last Sunday brunch, where it served what many people have described as the best tofu scramble they’ve ever had, and a crowd-pleasing rotation of crepe specials (this month, it was mango lassi).