Good article...next time you're up there you should really give the Warlock a go. Probably their best sandwich.

All the food is amazing!

3 of my favorite places! Yum!

The Blanchettes & the Drivers are amazing and the food at Pizza Pi & Wayward is delish! Can't beat the treats at Sidecar. Check 'em all out!!

These folks have really done a great job with these places. Try the french onion soup at Pizza Pi. Thanks, now I'm hungry.

After Portland created their vegan mall (a one block area populated by vegan businesses, with another vegan cafe within a brief walk), I'm so happy Seattle can claim an analogous area of its own. I hope that it will continue to expand on outward.

It is so great to see these places thriving, without a doubt due to the hard work and idealism of the people who run them.

Here's hoping the paper-sitter at the Secretary of State's office reads the article and signs off on the name change. ;)

Oh my god! I think this might be the first time in the history of the Stranger where all the comments, and even more astonishing - comments on VEGANISM, are positive! This makes me so happy :)

Ps: I already left a comment but need to add that if it had not been for the 30 years of PETA's campaigns, these 3 businesses wouldn't be thriving today! PETA never faltered in their message to the world: ANIMALS ARE NOT OURS TO EAT, WEAR, EXPERIMENT ON, USE FOR ENTERTAINMENT OR EXPLOIT IN ANY WAY. Furthermore PETA is ethical all the way, not just for Animals but for other organizations which they would NEVER denigrate! Bravo PETA! And thank you David Schmader for this excellent article about our "Vegan Universe", the only hope for our planet!

PETA may have been important at one point, but nowadays they are the LaRouche PAC of the Vegetarian/Vegan Movement. There. I said it. We can't make them stop...but little to no attention should be paid to their antics.

Pizza Pi and Wayward have always been my favorite restaurants, and still are. Wayward's constantly experimenting w/new menu items and weekly specials. Even do vegan omelettes now!

Pizza Pi will happily do their calzones with any number or combination of toppings, or if you go for a pizza, try it w/the stuffed crust! |D~

@j.lee - As a friend once said to me long ago re: PETA, someone has to define the extremes. If it weren't for PETA, the (arguably) more reasonable vegans among us wouldn't be where we are today. Plus, I think it's a false equivalency comparing a conservative political action committee to a non-profit group devoted to animal welfare. (Don't get me started on Animal Liberation Front - now *that*'s extreme!)

When people say that they hate what Peta does, surely they don't mean saving millions of lives and accomplishing more for the welfare of animals than any other group has ever done. I can only assume they're objecting to the stunts (naked ladies, etc.) But, guess what? It works! Peta has accomplished what it has in part, because of these stunts, which are sometimes called "tasteless". I find it far more tasteless to mutilate, skin alive, burn, scald alive, torment and torture animals than to draw attention to their plight.

PETA regularly targets women and children, which is one reason why many vegetarians like myself can't take them seriously. "The Sexual Politics of Meat" was one of the reasons I became a vegetarian in the first place.

Remember the campaign in which they handed fliers out to children walking with their mothers that showed the mom stabbing a bunny below the line "Your Mommy Kills Animals!"

Of course they never pull those stunts with fathers, but since women and children aren't as likely to fight back, they have no problem going after them repeatedly.

I mean, PETA'S track record of sexist ad campaigns is well documented.

Much as I'm in favor of naked women, PETA's stunts mostly seem silly to me, though I reluctantly acknowledge that flashy events and extreme ads are what it takes to get the attention of people under forty these days. They do lots more that doesn't get as much press, eg. distribution of literature and lobbying.

As for perceived sexism, let's talk about today's widespread misandry too.

PETA is loopy. If they spent HALF the money spreading the word on how palm oil (which is in basically all margarine, granola bars, and anything fried) destoys Sumatran Orangutan and Sumatran Tiger habitat (to the extent that they will be EXTINCT in ten years) instead of the seal hunt (which are in no danger of becoming extinct) I could take em seriously.

@14: If PETA is so concerned about saving animal lives, why haven't they adopted a no-kill shelter policy that coincides with this stated goal? Why are they calling for a ban and full euthanization of an entire breed of dog? Why aren't they denouncing ALL the actions of the ALF, as opposed to Ingrid Newkirk's backhanded comment that she's against arson but she still doesn't think those buildings should be left standing?

Great article and the praise for food and people is richly deserved. Whenever I eat at Wayward or Pizza Pi I have to wonder how anyone could feel shorted by vegan food.
The anti-PETA comment stopped me in my tracks. I am sure anyone who feels this way does so because they are UNAWARE of all the thousands of investigations and campaigns carried out by PETA, and only think of the flashy PR stunts involving nudity. As far as I am concerned, it is a matter of 'whatever it takes'. If everyone were open-minded and compassionate, facts would be sufficient, but they're not so they aren't. If nudity gets people's attention...it reflects on those who stop and gawk, never on the courageous young women who stand in the cold and have hundreds stare at them. PETA has been saying it exactly the way it is for thirty years, without regard for opinion or popularity, and I am colossally proud of them.

@14: There's in an inherent contradiction in saving lives (of whatever variety) and improving welfare when the resources of our planet are already insufficient to meet the needs of the creatures living on it. And while I don't think torturing animals for the sake of doing so, or for testing non-essential products (e.g. cosmetics), is something we should be doing, you hit a murky ethical grey area when we start talking about medical testing (where the deaths of thousands of animals can prevent the deaths and increase the welfare of millions of humans) or farming (where animals serve as pre-industrial machinery for tilling/transport/etc. and for concentrating nutrients; we couldn't actually feed everyone if the world went vegan, for example, because we'd have to expend significantly more calories in the production of each calorie, unless we're using fossil fuels, a dependency with its own host of problems).

Ethics is a set of systems of relative valuation, and PETA's perspective is heavily rooted in a privileged White upper-middle-/upper-class culture. In fact, the view that animal lives or suffering should carry anywhere near the same moral weight as human lives and suffering belies an extremely privileged perspective, as concern for other creatures to one's own determent becomes self-destructive behavior if one is literally struggling to survive, or socially-destructive if many people in one's society are struggling to survive.

Reducing the suffering of living creatures (all living creatures) by engaging in practices that allow for the best quality-of-life is an excellent ideal, but the issue isn't nearly as simple as "don't use animal products"; that is a naively-reductionist viewpoint. I have a big problem with single-issue activist organizations, because everything taking place in a culture impacts a wide range of factors in that culture. If we came up with a hamster-based renewable, sustainable power scheme that could bring fossil-fuel consumption to zero over the next five years, would that be okay? We might be saving millions of other animals with such a system by mitigating habitat destruction, we'd definitely be forcing hundreds of millions of hamsters to live tortured existences running on wheels all their lives, and we'd definitely be mitigating environmental degradation that threatens human survivability. I'd feel cheap about using a hypothetical situation to push a non-human-animal-ethics perspective to a logical extreme, but ethics is a hypothetical, constructed system anyway. If you think the hamster thing would be acceptable, then you tacitly acknowledge that the use of absolutist rhetoric is disingenuous (and once that's the case the consistent course is to evaluate practices on a case-by-case, context-by-context basis). If you think it's unacceptable, then you have an ethical framework that's consistent with absolutist rhetoric, at the cost of subordinating the well-being of yourself and your species to that of other species. If we had unlimited resources, we could afford to value and effect the well-being of every living thing equally, but unfortunately we don't have that luxury.

That said, if one DOES find oneself in the privileged position to reduce or eliminate animal products from one's use, it's probably going to help much more than it hurts, so one should make a concerted effort to do so. Just understand that there are a lot of people out there who cannot do so (barring the radical transformation of our society, something we should always be working toward), and ditch the moralist, absolutist rhetoric. There's enough vegan-bashing already, and I don't dislike vegans, I dislike people who universalize their own perspective without examining how it might function differently for someone in a different personal, cultural/historical context. "I choose to be vegan because I have that option and I think it helps my fellow creatures, human and not, live better lives," is laudable; "Everyone should be vegan because my perspective is the Correct, Morally Good one," is paternalistic and and ethnocentric in the extreme.

@20: They may be killing animals in one fashion because it's more ethical (within their system of ethics, which apparently doesn't value life as the highest "good"; mine doesn't either) than allowing them to die in another (lack of shelter, starvation) due to lack of resources.

@26, Admitting that we are where we are today in the US because we exploited animals is different than realizing that we no longer need to exploit animals.

Rethink ethnocentricity. It's bad when it exploits another culture but its good when it helps citizens to focus on their own behavior. Sometimes being non-ethnocentric is bad if it makes you so open-minded that you turn into the World Police. A call to end animal exploitation in our own big mean paternalistic ethnocentric privileged society has nothing to do with whether someone in a developing nation somewhere is milking a goat for their own consumption. We don't need to be
telling other countries what to do but we do need to realize if it's time for us to evolve past animal consumption.

Re: PETA I used to be a member of PETA but I don't want to associated with them anymore either because their brand image is terrible. They focus on marketing animal exploitation messages and forgot to market themselves well. I am tired of people thinking vegans are aggressive condescending angry weirdos with dreadlocks, signs, and fake blood. It's not the 60s or even the
90s anymore. It's not very effective to brand yourself as an alternative warrior fighting the system. i
know PETA does fight within the system but that is not where their money/focus/image emphasis rests and when they attempt to work within the system their attempts are really sad (naked celebs with a negative message about fur). Its ruined any credibility and hope for change that we have. Ultimately, they have sabotaged their own cause. Hope PETA uses one of their celeb image consultants soon because they are doing more harm than good. It's time for a new generation of vegans to take the spotlight. PETA is irrelevant and harmful.

@26, Admitting that we are where we are today in the US because we exploited animals is different than realizing that we no longer need to exploit animals.

Rethink ethnocentricity. It's bad when it exploits another culture but its good when it helps citizens to focus on their own behavior. Sometimes being non-ethnocentric is bad if it makes you so open-minded that you turn into the World Police. A call to end animal exploitation in our own big mean paternalistic ethnocentric privileged society has nothing to do with whether someone in a developing nation somewhere is milking a goat for their own consumption. We don't need to be
telling other countries what to do but we do need to realize if it's time for us to evolve past animal consumption.

Re: PETA I used to be a member of PETA but I don't want to associated with them anymore either because their brand image is terrible. They focus on marketing animal exploitation messages and forgot to market themselves well. I am tired of people thinking vegans are aggressive condescending angry weirdos with dreadlocks, signs, and fake blood. It's not the 60s or even the
90s anymore. It's not very effective to brand yourself as an alternative warrior fighting the system. i
know PETA does fight within the system but that is not where their money/focus/image emphasis rests and when they attempt to work within the system their attempts are really sad (naked celebs with a negative message about fur). Its ruined any credibility and hope for change that we have. Ultimately, they have sabotaged their own cause. Hope PETA uses one of their celeb image consultants soon because they are doing more harm than good. It's time for a new generation of vegans to take the spotlight. PETA is irrelevant and harmful.

It's good to see people's efforts.

Anthony Fiano
Carmel valley

Pigs are delicious and I go out of my way to kill and eat as many as possible.

Enjoy your tofu.