San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Plantbased fast food in the Bay Area.
Malibu’s and Amy’s in the Bay Area bring plantbased to burger joints
None of my years of cooking and eating veggie burgers, both at home and in restaurants, could have prepared me for the hulk I encountered at Malibu’s Burgers on Piedmont Avenue in Oakland.
The restaurant’s Tasha Grande is Malibu’s take on the McDonald’s Big Mac, though the sandwich’s $18.50 price tag immediately flagged the difference between the two. Ms. Grande is a tower of two plantbased meat patties with pickles, lettuce and the works enclosed in a soft, sesame seedstudded bun. The sandwich oozes with vegan mayonnaise sauce and coconut oilbased American cheese; landing the initial bite is much like climbing a boulder. Its attributes suggested the ample greasiness of an animalbased product, even if no animals had anything to do with it.
In a surprising twist, the future of food looked very much like the present.
At this point, plantbased fast food is a scene unto itself in the Bay Area. Malibu’s is just one of a legion of places that have opened or expanded in the past few years. Places like Señor Sisig Vegano in San Francisco, Vegan Mob in Oakland and the Amy’s Drive Thru restaurants in the North Bay are prominent faces of vegan food here. Other spots like the Italian Baia in Hayes Valley and Lion Dance Cafe in Oakland also have meatfree cuisine baked into their concepts, while many older Asian restaurants, like Golden Era in San Francisco’s Tenderloin and Nature Vegetarian in downtown Oakland, have been serving up meatfree cuisine for years.
Of all those, though, one of the most popular and growing markets is the take on the allAmerican burger joint, like Malibu’s and Amy’s. Both have slightly different approaches to the concept.
The former relies on techdriven innovations in plantbased protein. The fastfood truckturnedrestaurant from Darren Preston, Natasha FernándezPérez and Wahid Brown is entirely vegan and utilizes plantbased meat from Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods. It’s modeled after places like Los Angeles’ Monty’s Good Burger, which serves InNOutstyle burgers and shakes (though, frankly, with much better fries than InNOut).
Like Monty’s, Malibu’s is premised on the idea that not all vegan food needs to be health food. The nutritional facts of the core ingredient, Impossible meat, also bear this out: A 4ounce patty may have no cholesterol, but it does provide more saturated fat and way more sodium than the average beef patty.
Now popular among both vegan and nonvegan establishments, the ubiquity of the product (and its counterpart by Beyond Meat) means that there’s often not much difference that one can discern from burgertoburger, unlike house veggie burger blends or even custom meat blends. The standardization of plantbased burger meat, while making the vegan option more accessible to restaurants and chains, makes for a rather boring landscape.
But from the getgo, Malibu’s has distinguished itself through its excesses. There’s joy in getting something like the Fieriesque Needy Meaty burger ($16), a bestial stack of slippery caramelized onions, vegan bacon, cheese and a piquant, jalapeñoandvegan mayo “lizard” sauce. Like a sandbag in the face of a tsunami, the chewy pretzel bun can barely contain the pure, sloppy force of the sandwich.
One can order at the counter for pickup. Often, Malibu’s will have intriguing specials and collaborations with other vegan businesses run by people of color on the menu, like ground “beef”stuffed pastelillos made by Oakland’s Casa Boriqueña. The deepfried and blistered turnovers crackle when you bite into them and feature the ideal treatment of plantbased ground meat: cooked down with plenty of onions, garlic, herbs and seasonings to add flavor and moisture.
Amy’s Drive Thru has also introduced a meatfree take on an old fastfood model, meant to serve “hardworking citizens, busy families and roadweary travelers.” (What about us lazy citizens?) Yes, this is the same Amy’s that makes the burritos and Greek rice bowls in your grocer’s freezer. Its three locations along Highway 101 clearly indicate that the chain is poised to become a roadtrip fixture, perhaps as ubiquitous as the golden arches that tower over countless gas stations around the country. Its first location opened in Rohnert Park in 2015, and the Corte Madera location opened five years later. Everything on the vegetarian menu is also available in vegan and/or glutenfree variations.
If you’ve eaten any of the Amy’s Kitchen products available at many grocery stores, the menu will look very familiar. Eating those soups and burritos from a restaurant instead of the freezer is odd at first, like taking your first steps out of Plato’s allegorical cave and touching a real, live plant. The chunky tomato bisque ($4.29) doesn’t have that distinct canny taste to it. Nor do the burritos feature the moltenhot filling and somewhat icy center that I had become accustomed to during college, though it’s still bland and spiceless.
But like any other drivethrough, the burgers are the bedrock of Amy’s. The Amy ($6.49) consists of two juicy vegetable patties covered with melted cheese, a sweetandspicy mayonnaisebased sauce, lettuce and other typical burger toppings on a squishy bun. Pickle slices add flashes of tang to your bite. Served in a cardboard clamshell printed with the Amy’s logo, this is a road burger throughandthrough, leaving hardly any evidence of its existence on your lap (or your gut) as you eat in the car. A side of spoton sweet potato fries ($3.79) is light, crunchy and not very salty: The texture feels junk foody, but it’s definitely a vegetable.
Most impressive is the price point
of the menu here, which doesn’t seriously outpace that of the typical fastfood joint. I’ve taken countless road trips, and I believe if there were more Amy’s Drive Thrus around, those drives would have been a little more tolerable. I wouldn’t get the burrito again, but those burgers would be a welcome alternative to the fare at the dominant road food institutions.
Excelling at mimicking American fast food is one way to reduce meat consumption among average Americans, though it can have its downsides. I couldn’t finish any of the burgers I got from Malibu’s. It’s not that the food tasted bad — the drippy sauces and fillings were just so much to deal with. The caloric density of the meat, sauce and cheese was overwhelming.
With roots in many cultures around the world, plantbased cuisine has numerous facets to it, but in the United States we keep coming back to the fastfood burger. Climatechange activists, vegans, halal foodies, fine dining chefs and nativists make it and remake it in their own images: This burger is allAmerican; this burger is what real men eat; this burger will advance luxury automated communism; this burger is the new face of conspicuous consumption.
While neither espouse grand ideals about how their take on fast food will change the world, it’s all in the subtext. Malibu’s, a Blackowned business, is part of a growing group of restaurants and caterers in the Bay Area that speak directly to vegans of color, many of whom struggle to fit into Eurocentric vegan communities.
And by adopting as banal a restaurant model as the American drivethrough restaurant, Amy’s normalizes its brand of organic eating and vegetarianism, assimilating it into an interaction that most of us associate with commodity beef and chicken. The solar panels on the roof express hope that fastfood restaurants could play a part in fighting climate change, though one could easily argue that embracing car culture as an integral part of its model is a significant step back from meaningfully reducing greenhouse gases.
The idea that vegan fast food is a realistic way to meet American diners where they’re at will likely continue to resonate with restaurateurs hoping to make plantbased food more commonplace in this country. So what are the contenders at Malibu’s Burgers and Amy’s Drive Thru trying to say? Perhaps they’re insisting that the desire for junk food is universal — which is as American a sentiment as you can get.