Slutty Vegan is Opening Its First Manhattan Location. Here’s Where

Vegan fast-food chain Slutty Vegan is no longer a regional brand. Gaining national attention for its indulgent eats, massive queues, and cheeky names, Slutty Vegan has taken the national stage. This week, founder Pinky Cole announced that Slutty Veganis is opening a second location in New York City next month.

Located at 300 West 135th Street, Slutty Vegan Harlem will become the brand's eighth brick-and-mortar location, opening two months after its sister location in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Now, New Yorkers in two boroughs can easily pick up the nationally-famous, crave-worthy vegan comfort classics.

"This is a full circle moment for me,” Cole said. “I had a restaurant a few blocks away that was destroyed in a grease fire. To come back to the place that helped me get started is such a big deal for the realization of my dream, and this quite frankly is my redemption story!”

Slutty Vegan Harlem's carry-out menu features inventive styles of vegan burgers, sandwiches, and more made with exclusively plant-based ingredients. The fully plant-based menu includes familiar favorites from previous locations along with newly added comfort foods including:

This September, Cole announced that she was finally leaving the southern United States to bring tasty, plant-based comfort classics to her old city, New York. Before relocating to Atlanta, Cole opened her first restaurant in Harlem before it burned down.

“My first ever restaurant – Pinky’s Jamaican & American Restaurant – was in Harlem, so this is a full-circle moment for me,” Cole said at the time. “It’s an honor to be opening a concept in such an established space, just down the street from where Biggie Smalls grew up, and to bring more delicious vegan food to the Brooklyn community.”

The two New York City locations are part of Cole's effort to make Slutty Vegan a national brand. With aims to deliver fun and accessible vegan food, Slutty Vegan currently operates seven locations, including metro-Atlanta stores in the Edgewood, Jonesboro, Duluth, and West View neighborhoods as well as new outposts in Athens, Georgia, Birmingham, Alabama, and Brooklyn, New York.

Slutty Vegan fans include celebrities such as Snoop Dogg, Jermaine Dupri, Taraji P. Henson, Tyler Perry, Tiffany Haddish, and Queen Latifah among thousands of hungry customers that line up at the door. Cole hopes that her enticing plant-based eats will convince meat-eaters to give plant-based options a chance.

"They taste good and you have a good experience while eating them. And when I did that, not only did it work, but it did is it opened up an avenue for people to not be so stuffy when you talk about veganism. It doesn’t have to be as politicized as we make it," Cole told The Beet in January. "Now 97 percent of the people who come to my business are not vegan. I like it that way because I get to introduce them to this whole new way of living without pushing my agenda on them and that part feels the best to me."

This May, Slutty Vegan secured a $25 million investment package to help the famous burger chain accelerate its expansion. By the end of 2023, Cole expects that Slutty Vegan will operate 25 locations nationwide. The funding round was led by social commerce giant Richelieu Denni’s New Voices Fund and Shake Shack founder Danny Meyer’s Enlightened Hospitality Investments,

“To have the New Voices Venture Fund and the GOAT of the restaurant industry, Danny Meyer himself, to have them a part of this team is a recipe for success,” Cole said at the time. “I’m excited about the people I’m involved with."

Other than the two New York City locations, Cole is eyeing several other cities for Slutty Vegan's national expansion, including Baltimore, Maryland.

Cole aims to feed Americans everywhere, but the entrepreneur also intends to give back to disenfranchised communities nationwide. The Pinky Cole Foundation is devoted to assisting underserved communities and people of color to succeed when faced with discrimination. Her organization aims to empower economic progress in communities of color and other support Black-owned businesses.

“When people see that you are not only building a profitable company, but you are building an ecosystem, people respect that,” Cole told Inc. “They continue to want to support you. It feels so good to know that level of growth can come beyond money, and funnel back out to our communities.”

To find delicious plant-based fare in your neighborhood, check out The Beet's Find Vegan Near Me articles.