The EU might be about to attempt to outlaw the use of words vegan burgers and sausages, but that won’t impact the team at Rudy’s Diner, the high profile Camden vegan restaurant.
It has announced that for world Vegan Day on November 1st, it is to open the UK’s first vegan butcher. There is already a vegan cheese shop in London in Brick Lane, and there have been pop up vegan butcher stores before. The store in Islington though would be the first permanent vegan butcher in the UK.
Customers can choose from a large range of fake meats including soya and seitan versions of bacon, chicken and beef. The store will also sell takeaways such as homemade pastrami, dirty burger patties, cheeze sauce & chilli-non-carne, as well as a rack of jack, lobstah salad, meatballs, chick’n lover pate and shredded BBQ pulled porc. For people who cannot make it to the store in Islington, there will be an online delivery service too.
The mock up of the store also mirrors a traditional butcher store, a move which has generated a great deal of debate among both vegans and meat alike. Some vegans feel that the replication of satire that seels animal flesh is anathema to vegan principles. Others have taken the view that the butcher concept is basically a smart publicity stunt. If they had called it a delicatessen it wouldn’t have been covered by the newspapers, said one commenter.
The marque ‘vegetarian butcher’ has been in use for several years now it is used by the Unilever backed Dutch-brand The Vegetarian Butcher, whose products are widely available in UK supermarkets.
