Hong Kong Restaurant Secretly Goes Vegan

Hong Kong-based Hemingway’s Bar & Grill recently became a fully vegan restaurant. Owner Gary Stokes began transitioning to veganism in 2010 when he volunteered to join an anti-whaling campaign in Antarctica with vegan ocean conservation organization Sea Shepherd. When Stokes returned from the fourth-month trip, he realized that serving animal products at Hemingway’s, then a Caribbean barbecue restaurant, no longer aligned with his morals. “Here I am trying to save the ocean and I basically have shares in a meat company,” Stokes, who is now Sea Shepherd’s director of Southeast Asia, told South China Morning Post. The restauranuer began to transition the menu at Hemingway’s by first removing meat from its Rude Boy Chili, a move Stokes said patrons did not notice. To finalize the transition in June, Stokes replaced meat-heavy menu items with plant-based alternatives made by California-based company Beyond Meat. “When I would first tell people that I was vegan, it was like telling them I was green with three eyes,” Stokes said about his vegan transition in 2010. “And that’s where it has changed now; it’s gone so mainstream, which is fantastic.”