Today, all orders at popular Atlanta restaurant Slutty Vegan will be free of charge from open until close, 12pm to 7:30pm, thanks to a partnership with a group of celebrities. Actress La La Anthony (wife of NBA star Carmelo Anthony), musician Ludacris, actress Gabrielle Union-Wade, and NBA star Chris Paul bought out the restaurant for the day in an effort to support Slutty Vegan’s positive contributions to the local community.
Earlier this month, Slutty Vegan owner Pinky Cole announced a partnership with HBCU Clark Atlanta University (her alma mater) that will send the four children of Rayshard Brooks—a Black man killed by police in a Wendy’s parking lot on June 12—to college when they are ready. Cole is also providing the Brooks’ family with life insurance and a new car. The announcement sparked a negative online campaign against Slutty Vegan, which resulted in false reviews and one-star ratings on the restaurant’s Yelp and Google pages. Slutty Vegan fans responded by flooding those pages with accurate reviews, resulting in 18,000 positive Google reviews within a 72-hour period.
In 2018, Cole initially launched Slutty Vegan as a food truck and quickly attracted a large following, with customers waiting up to five hours in line to be “sluttified” by sampling Cole’s innovative Impossible Burger-based, Caribbean-inspired creations such as the Fussy Hussy, Dancehall Queen, and One Night Stand. In January 2019, Cole opened the first brick-and-mortar location of Slutty Vegan and shortly thereafter purchased two more properties in Jonesboro and Old Fourth Ward to open the second and third outposts of the vegan restaurant. To date, Slutty Vegan has attracted a number of celebrity customers, including producer and actress Lena Waithe, rapper Snoop Dogg, musician Usher, comedian Tyler Perry, and many more.
In addition to assisting the Brooks’ family, Cole has given back to her community in myriad ways through her nonprofit The Pinky Cole Foundation, including helping pay the tuition balances of 30 Clark Atlanta University students last year in an effort to help them stay in school; paying the rent for other small businesses in the Metro-Atlanta area during the COVID-19 pandemic; and providing meals to Atlanta’s essential workers working on the frontlines of the pandemic. Earlier this month, Cole partnered with musician Jermaine Dupri and Impossible Foods to kick off the year-long Votenik campaign, which helps keep people fed as they go out to vote.
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