The first thing to know about By Chloe is that the chipotle aioli and the beet ketchup are very good, and very free. Joe Gould would be delighted, but there are very few Gould-like characters left in the West Village, where this vegan fast-food chain’s original branch is located, and even fewer near some of the other locations, in SoHo, Williamsburg, and the Flatiron district. Think of By Chloe as Shake Shack without the meat. Bid adieu to the days when vegans were dour granola eaters swathed in carob-stained hemp shirts, and say hello to a new, well-heeled subset of SoulCycling, health-obsessing foodies. Call them bubblegum vegans.
Whole families of them descend on By Chloe. Witness, in the SoHo branch, a teen-age girl, bespandexed, glued to a Y.A. soap on her phone, and chewing a tartly satisfying guacamole burger, the patty a mix of black beans, quinoa, and sweet potatoes. Her father sports a jewelled watch and stares at his phone while munching on a steaming pile of dairy-free ginger-spice pancakes. Opposite sits her mother, photographing a quinoa taco salad with her Vuitton-cased phone. Only the girl’s sister, dipping a sweet-potato fry into that lusciously beety ketchup, attempts to make eye contact with her family. None of them look up.
By Chloe’s upper echelons are having family issues of their own. Chloe Coscarelli, the restaurant’s namesake and the originator of many of the recipes, was recently forced out of the business she founded three years ago, after the company she had partnered with alleged that she had become negligent. Cue a guerrilla war fought on the blogosphere and in New York tabloids. Cue, too, a vicious rumor that the split happened because the partner company wanted to serve animal products.
Despite Coscarelli’s departure, By Chloe will keep its name. And, while this calls to mind the deletion of Trotsky from photographs during Stalin’s reign, the official word is that the restaurant will stay plant-based, and won’t change the food, which is undeniably delicious. The burgers are springy (the classic involves lentils, tempeh, and chia), the basil pesto is zesty, and the faux mac and cheese, with a sweet-potato-cashew-cheese sauce and shiitake bacon, is better than the real thing. At the SoHo branch the other day, over coconut waters in the shell, one bearded man said to another, “You’re only a runner once you run the New York Marathon. Last year, after the race, we were picked up by a Gulfstream so we could go to French Laundry”—Thomas Keller’s California restaurant. Around them, a horde of bubblegum vegans continued stuffing their faces, too content to bother with such a public boast. (Entrées $5.95-$11.95.) ♦
