vegansaurus!

Store Review: Loyal Army!

The stuff at Loyal Army is so fucking adorable it’ll make you barf kittens. The cuteness, it’s painful like a migraine. Like the kind of migraine you get when you look at me because I AM SO CUTE SOMETIMES IT CROSSES THE BORDER INTO REPULSIVE.

Loyal Army is a relatively young, SF-based company (the flagship store is in the Upper Haight!) that makes cute hoodies, cute shirts, cute bags and cute accessories in all sorts of different cute overload prints and designs. They have stuff for women, men, teens, tweens, kids, toddlers, babies and preemies (aww). Actually, their stuff is probably most suited for kids because some of this shirts makes grown people look straight up ridiculous. If you’re 30 and wearing a t-shirt with a talking stack of pancakes on it, I’m gonna automatically lose respect for you. Actually, I’ll probably try to be your best friend but really, you can do better.

MOST IMPORANTLY, Loyal Army launched a line of t-shirts and tote bags with an “Animals Have Rights Too” theme, including a dog and a cat hugging in a heart-shaped explosion of adorability! It will make you want to tear your eyes out because you JUST CAN’T TAKE IT and it’s on sale for $12! The coolest part is that 20 percent of the proceeds of the sales of these shirts and totes go to Rocket Dog Rescue, a local dog rescue group that saves dogs from the shelter and abuse and neglect situations and puts them into loving homes <3.

And, with that, I promise I will never use the word, “cute” again in any of my reviews. We can start a dollar jar for every time I fuck up. Then, at the end of the year, you can take the dollar jar and buy yourself a Delorean.

All You Knead!

I never would have thought to visit All You Knead, except for the chance that brought me to the Haight one weekend morning, when the line at the Pork Store (across the street) looked a little too daunting. I was initially skeptical that they would have any decent vegan options at all, but I was pleasantly surprised.

Not only does All You Knead provide a few vegan selections right on the menu, but with some clever ordering and substituting, you can make yourself a true feast. They have a pretty standard tofu scramble option, but they also allow you to substitute tofu in any of their scrambled egg dishes—at no charge! imagine that!—you’ll have to leave the cheese off, too, naturally. Somewhere in the ordering process, we noticed they offered tempeh bacon, so that went into the scramble too. Home fries, of course, sadly, are not vegan (the usual) but we substituted french fries, which in the end was probably more delicious anyway. The end result was a HUGE PILE of food, just as good, if not better, than what you can get at the Pork Store, and way less greasy, too. (I once found a piece of ham in my Pork Store scramble, by the way. Just saying.) An enormous plate of food that’s a meal for one hella hungry fat person* or two meals for a regular hungry person. The waitress was really nice and knew what was and wasn’t vegan. Actually, we think maybe she was vegan because instead of butter, she brought us out a side of avocado for our bread! So thoughtful and so delicious!

All You Knead serves up good quality diner food with a Haight Street twist (meaning vegans can have our tofu scrambles and boca burgers) in a large restaurant (meaning very rarely a wait, even on weekends!), and it’s definitely an option when you find yourself in the Haight and need a lot of food and RIGHT NOW I’M STARVING.

*or one Jonas

Blue Front Café

Blue Front isn’t just in the Haight, it’s on Haight, so all the food is a little pricier than you’d like. The wraps are chock full of deliciousness, however, and the texture and tang of the hummus is incomparable. I mean, for serious. I hear the gyros are good, but not being a meat-eater, I can’t vouch for them.

The vegetarian selections are bountiful and tasty. The avocado has always been buttery and perfectly ripe — no one likes a hard avocado, after all — and that spicy orange-colored sauce is delightful. The garden salad is huge and a good price. Get falafel in a pita with some dolmas to go and stop off at the New Lite Market for a six-pack, and there’s your night.

When I lived in the Haight, a trip to Blue Front and back took me no more than fifteen minutes round trip, and this was before I learned to call ahead to avoid waiting inside. I don’t know that I ever properly appreciated having such a quality “Mediterranean for the undiscerning Occidental” café so close to my front door, but, hindsight. The owners are Greek Orthodox dudes from Jerusalem, and you must love them for adapting their cuisine to your international palate. Or at least, the palate your parents created when they gave two-year-old you a bunch of food in a plastic plate with inch-high sides and let you mix it all up and eat it as a huge mush of flavors. You see? They know and love you; that’s why you can get a wrap with hummus, avocado, falafel, lettuce, tomato, and dolmas.

I advise getting any of their vegetarian wraps except the one with cheese, which I have never tried and do not advocate on account of its not being vegan. Make liberal use of the orange sauce; it will help you forget that you are paying $1-$2 more for your food than you would were you not on Haight, but sometimes figurative costs do have literal translations, and this is one of them.