Choosing the best vegan restaurants in the United States is no small task. The website Happy Cow, which is like Yelp, only for vegan and vegetarian food, lists nearly 23,000 veg restaurants in the U.S., including 1,240 purely vegan restaurants.
While the bulk of the U.S. vegan food scene is concentrated in California (with 261 vegan restaurants) and New York (143), smaller cities, towns, and certain states you wouldn’t expect also boast a strong vegan game. Texas, for example, now has 64 vegan restaurants, Florida has 106, and Pennsylvania claims 49.
Those numbers will only continue to rise. From 2014 to 2017 alone, the U.S. saw a staggering 600 percent increase in people who identify as vegan, and "vegan" is now officially a more common Google search term than "vegetarian," surging 90 percent in 2016.
So how’s a person to choose the best vegan restaurants? Consult this list and check out Happy Cow, Yelp, and local vegan Facebook groups to hear people’s top vegan food recommendations.
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