Best Vegan Restaurants Worldwide

Vegan fine dining is not vegetarian fine dining

The single most useful distinction in this guide is the one most menus blur. Vegetarian cooking excludes meat and fish but leans hard on dairy and eggs — butter, cream, cheese and yolks do most of the heavy lifting for richness and texture. Vegan cooking removes those too, which takes away the easiest tools a chef has for fat, body and umami. A vegetarian kitchen that loses its butter and parmesan is suddenly a different, harder restaurant. That is why a genuinely great vegan room is rarer than a great vegetarian one, and why the few that exist are worth the trip.

The category is also unsettled in a way no other cuisine on this site is. Its most famous standard-bearer, Eleven Madison Park, went fully plant-based in 2021 and reversed course in October 2025, reintroducing optional meat and seafood. France's first starred vegan restaurant, ONA, won its star in 2021 and closed the next year. Against that churn, London's Plates became the first vegan restaurant in Britain to earn a Michelin star in 2025, and the oldest plant-only fine dining on earth — the Buddhist temple kitchens of Japan, China and Korea — has been quietly doing this for centuries. This guide maps both the new movement and the old tradition.

The four signals of a serious vegan kitchen

1. The vegetable is the dish, not a stand-in for meat. The tell of a confident vegan kitchen is that it cooks the vegetable for what it is — roasting a celeriac whole for hours, charring a cabbage to its heart, ageing a beetroot — rather than reaching for a seitan "steak" that apologises for the absence of beef. Meat mimicry is a crutch; vegetable conviction is the craft. The best rooms make you forget the question of what is missing.

2. Umami built without animals. The hardest technical problem in vegan cooking is savoury depth, and the great kitchens solve it with fermentation and the larder of East Asia: koji, miso, soy, tamari, kombu, dried and roasted mushrooms, fermented vegetable pastes and slow-reduced stocks. The shojin and Chinese-Buddhist traditions have a thousand-year head start here. A vegan plate that tastes flat has skipped this work; one that tastes deep has done it.

3. Fat and mouthfeel solved honestly. Without butter, cream or egg yolk, richness has to come from somewhere — cold-pressed nut and seed oils, cashew and coconut creams, avocado, tahini, aquafaba whipped to a meringue, emulsions built from scratch. A serious vegan kitchen has a clear, repeatable answer to mouthfeel; a weak one serves you a plate of well-meaning but lean, watery vegetables.

4. Whole-vegetable cookery and the calendar. The best vegan rooms use the whole plant — root to leaf, stalk and trim — and rewrite the menu with the harvest, because a kitchen this dependent on produce lives and dies by the season. A static, year-round vegan menu is a warning sign; a board that changes every few weeks with what the farms are cutting is the mark of a kitchen that means it.

From the temple kitchen to the three-star plant menu

Plant-only fine dining is not a 2020s invention. Its oldest and most refined form is Buddhist temple cooking: Japanese shojin ryori, codified in Zen monasteries from the thirteenth century and built entirely without meat, fish, or even onion and garlic; Chinese Buddhist vegetarian cuisine; and Korean temple food. These traditions are vegan by religious precept and technically extraordinary, leaning on tofu, yuba, sesame, kombu and fermentation. Tokyo's Daigo (two Michelin stars) and Beijing's King's Joy (two Michelin stars and a Green Star) carry the temple tradition into the guide.

The Western vegetarian-fine-dining movement began with Joia in Milan, where Pietro Leemann earned the first Michelin star for a vegetarian restaurant in Europe in 1996. The modern strictly-vegan movement is younger and more turbulent: ONA near Bordeaux became the first vegan restaurant in France to win a star in 2021 (and closed in 2022); Eleven Madison Park made the loudest statement of all when Daniel Humm relaunched a three-star New York institution as fully plant-based in 2021, a run that ended in October 2025; and Plates in London, the siblings Kirk and Keeley Haworth's room, became the first vegan restaurant in Britain to earn a Michelin star in 2025, within months of opening. The new movement is still finding its feet; the old temple tradition never lost its footing.

The global vegan map

London and the UK

Plates in Shoreditch (one Michelin star; chef Kirk Haworth; the first vegan restaurant in Britain to earn a star, awarded 2025; the seasonal plant tasting is the most decorated vegan meal in the country). Gauthier Soho (chef Alexis Gauthier, who turned his classical French room fully vegan in 2021; the faux-gras and the tasting menu are the flagship). Tendril in Mayfair (the playful vegetable-forward room, largely vegan). Mallow at Borough Market and Holy Carrot for the casual-smart end. London is the clear capital of the modern vegan movement in Europe.

New York and the Americas

Eleven Madison Park (three Michelin stars; chef Daniel Humm; fully plant-based from 2021 until October 2025, when optional meat and seafood courses returned — the plant menu remains the heart of the room but it is no longer strictly vegan). Dirt Candy on the Lower East Side (chef Amanda Cohen's pioneering vegetable tasting; vegetarian rather than strictly vegan, but the template for the genre). abcV in Flatiron (Jean-Georges Vongerichten's plant-based room). Kajitsu in Murray Hill (the shojin-ryori temple kitchen). Avant Garden in the East Village (the intimate vegan tasting). In Los Angeles, Crossroads Kitchen (chef Tal Ronnen's Mediterranean vegan, the celebrity standard) and Shojin (Japanese macrobiotic vegan) lead.

Continental Europe

Joia in Milan (one Michelin star; chef Pietro Leemann; the first vegetarian restaurant in Europe to earn a star, in 1996; vegetarian, with a deep vegan menu). FREA in Berlin (the zero-waste vegan room that composts everything it cannot cook). Cookies Cream in Berlin (one Michelin star; vegetarian rather than vegan, but the longest-running starred meat-free room in Germany). Lucky Leek in Berlin (the established vegan fine-dining address). France's vegan tier thinned after ONA near Bordeaux closed in 2022; the country's plant cooking now lives mostly inside vegetable-forward omnivore kitchens rather than dedicated vegan rooms.

Asia and the temple tradition

Daigo in Tokyo (two Michelin stars; the shojin-ryori temple kitchen beside Atago Shrine; strictly plant-based Buddhist cuisine of tofu, yuba and seasonal mountain vegetables). King's Joy in Beijing (two Michelin stars and a Michelin Green Star; the Buddhist-vegetarian room in a Dongcheng hutong, formerly the world's first three-star vegetarian restaurant). Fu He Hui in Shanghai (two Michelin stars; chef Tony Lu; the most decorated vegetarian Chinese restaurant on the mainland). In Seoul, Balwoo Gongyang serves Korean Buddhist temple cuisine across from Jogyesa Temple, and the monk Jeong Kwan at Baekyangsa is the tradition's most famous voice. The Asian temple kitchens are the oldest and most rigorous plant-only fine dining in the world.

What's not vegan fine dining

A vegetarian restaurant is not a vegan one. The distinction is not pedantry: a room that relies on butter, cream, cheese and eggs is solving the richness problem the easy way, and many of the most celebrated "plant" restaurants — including some on this page — are vegetarian, not vegan. Joia and Cookies Cream and Dirt Candy are extraordinary and they use dairy or eggs. A diner who eats strictly vegan needs to confirm the kitchen can run the whole menu without animal products, because many cannot.

The meat-mimicry gastropub is not vegan fine dining. A bar serving an Impossible burger, vegan "wings" and a jackfruit "pulled pork" sandwich is doing something useful and popular, but it is processed-protein cooking, not the vegetable craft of a serious kitchen. The whole project of fine-dining vegan cooking is to make the vegetable the point, not to manufacture a convincing fake steak.

"Vegan options" bolted onto an omnivore menu are not the same as a vegan restaurant. A single ring-fenced dish — the obligatory risotto or the roasted-vegetable plate — is an accommodation, not a cuisine. The kitchens in this guide are built around plants from the first stock to the last dessert, which is a fundamentally different discipline than adapting one course of a meat menu.

The raw-vegan juice-cleanse wellness room is a different category again. Cold-pressed, dehydrator-and-blender "un-cooking" positioned as a detox is a lifestyle product; it can be delicious, but it is not the technique-driven, fire-and-fermentation cooking of Plates, Daigo or Gauthier Soho. Judge a vegan fine-dining room on its cooking, not its wellness claims.

The vocabulary

Vegan — Excludes all animal products — meat, fish, dairy, eggs and honey. The strictest plant-based category and the hardest to cook at fine-dining level.

Vegetarian — Excludes meat and fish but permits dairy and eggs. Many celebrated 'plant' restaurants are vegetarian, not vegan.

Plant-based — A broader, looser term for food centred on plants; sometimes used as a synonym for vegan, sometimes for a mostly-plant menu with occasional exceptions.

Shojin ryori — Japanese Buddhist temple cuisine, plant-based by religious precept; built on tofu, yuba, sesame, kombu and seasonal vegetables, without onion or garlic.

Koji — Aspergillus oryzae, the mould behind miso, soy sauce and sake; a cornerstone of building savoury depth in vegan cooking.

Miso — Fermented soybean paste; a primary source of umami and salt in plant-based kitchens.

Aquafaba — The viscous liquid from cooked chickpeas, whipped like egg white into meringues, mousses and emulsions; a key vegan substitute for eggs.

Seitan — Wheat-gluten protein with a chewy, meat-like texture; a mimicry tool used sparingly by serious kitchens and heavily by casual ones.

Tempeh — Fermented whole-soybean cake with a firm bite and nutty flavour, originating in Indonesia.

Nutritional yeast — Deactivated yeast flakes with a cheesy, savoury flavour, used for umami and a dairy-free cheese note.

Yuba — The skin that forms on heated soy milk; a delicate, protein-rich staple of shojin and Chinese-Buddhist cooking.

Green Star — Michelin's separate award for sustainability — sourcing, waste and ethics — distinct from the one-to-three cooking stars.