2 min read · October 4, 2026
What America's Vegan Restaurants Actually Cook
Asian kitchens and burger shops lead the country's 500 fully vegan restaurants, while Indian, Ethiopian and pizza places are all over the vegan-friendly list but rarely go all the way. Here's what our data shows.
The data
This piece uses the Sept. 30, 2026 edition of the Vegaholic directory: 5,577 listings, of which 500 are fully vegan and 4,976 are restaurants with vegan options. Cuisine comes from OpenStreetMap tags, which not every listing has: 316 of the fully vegan restaurants and 4,232 of the vegan-friendly ones carry one. The counts below come from those tagged listings, so read them as the shape of the scene rather than an exact census.
Fully vegan: Asian kitchens and burgers lead
Among fully vegan restaurants, East and Southeast Asian kitchens are the biggest group: 71 of the 316 with a cuisine tag. That counts Thai (15), Chinese (14), Japanese and sushi (11), Vietnamese (6), Korean (2), ramen and noodle shops (3), and 20 tagged simply Asian. American and comfort food comes next with 53, including 44 tagged American and 5 soul food kitchens. Then burgers, with 43, and Latin American and Caribbean cooking, led by 19 Mexican restaurants, with 31.
Sweets punch above their weight. 48 of the 500 fully vegan listings are bakeries or doughnut shops, against 7 tagged as pizzerias.
Vegan-friendly: Mexican, everywhere
The picture flips among restaurants that aren't fully vegan but have vegan options. Mexican is the most common cuisine tag there by a wide margin, on 653 listings. American (339), coffee shops (325), pizza (321), Indian (226) and sandwich shops (221) follow.
The cuisines that rarely go all the way
Some cuisines are easy to eat vegan at but rarely build a whole menu without animal products. Indian is the clearest case: 226 vegan-friendly listings, against 3 fully vegan Indian restaurants. Ethiopian, with its lentil and vegetable stews, has 45 vegan-friendly listings and 2 fully vegan. Pizza has 321 vegan-friendly listings and 7 fully vegan, and Mexican has 653 and 19.
Doughnuts and burgers run the other way. The edition has 13 fully vegan doughnut shops against 39 vegan-friendly ones, about one in four, and 40 fully vegan burger shops against 191 vegan-friendly ones, about one in six. Those are the highest shares among the common categories, and they track the chains: Next Level Burger, Plant Power, Slutty Vegan, Dottie's Donuts and Mighty-O Donuts have built whole businesses around one vegan product done well.
What this means when you travel
If a town has no fully vegan restaurant, its Indian, Ethiopian, Thai and Mexican kitchens are the likeliest places to find a full vegan meal, and the vegan-friendly listings on each city page are the place to start. When a town does have an all-vegan spot, the most common kinds are an Asian kitchen, an American comfort-food spot, a burger counter, a café or a bakery.
The full numbers behind this piece, by state and city, are on our vegan restaurant statistics page.