The popular vegan restaurant Unity Diner located in the Spitalfields area of East London, UK, founded in 2018 by the famous vegan activist Ed Winters (mostly known as Earthling Ed), will be permanently closing its doors from the 1st of February 2025.
According to a social media post from the restaurant, rising costs experienced since COVID-19 have forced it to shut its doors for good. In an Instagram announcement, Earthling Ed wrote, “Restaurant closures are running at their highest level in more than a decade. A total of 1,409 shut their doors in the year ending September 2024, up from 1,180 in the 12 months before. The situation for hospitality in the UK at the moment is beyond anything we could have expected. We’re proud to have battled through it for so long.”
There may be many factors that are contributing to the closure of many vegan restaurants in the UK (and especially in London). It may just be that it is part of the normal hospitality ecosystem when some restaurants close while others open, but we only learn the news of the vegan restaurants that close as people from the vegan community get attached to particular eateries (especially those with a campaigning significance). It may be an issue to do with vegan restaurants trying to imitate meat dishes (as is the case of the “fish and chips” of Unity Diner) making their costs higher than if they just offered minimally processed whole plant-based foods — which would be cheaper than meat dishes. Another may be the “fashionable” element of eating plant-based food among flexitarians and the self-defined reducetarians who lack a real commitment to the diet, so they would only try vegan restaurants a couple of times. A likely reason, though, may be that the boom of veganism in the UK since 2016 created an unusually high number of vegan restaurants beyond the natural capacity of the city, and this anomaly is now being organically corrected.
In addition to this restaurant, Surge, the animal rights organisation run by Earthling Ed, also created an animal sanctuary. The Surge Sanctuary, which provides a forever home to rescued farmed animals, was the beneficiary of the profits made at the restaurant.
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