EJ's Soul Food & Vegan Bar & Grill — Restaurant in Gastonia

Vegans do not exploit animals. The owners are exploiting animals by supporting & contributing to the abuse & slaughter of animals for profit. So it is illogical to have "vegan" in their name. This restaurant is called "EJ's Soul Food & Vegan Bar & Grill". Yet, the owners are not vegan and the menu isn't not vegan. A vegan restaurant is entirely vegan. A vegan menu is entirely vegan. So, having "Vegan" in their name when the owners eat and exploit animals is completely antithetical to veganism and therefore extremely misleading. It's GREAT that they have vegan options. Basically every restaurant has vegan options. But calling the restaurant vegan when it only has a small fraction of items that are vegan and the owners aren't even vegan is like someone saying they're vegan because they eat broccoli & potatoes with their steak and eggs. No, vegans do not exploit animals.

I understand the owners received help from vegans to add items to the menu, train staff, and even work to limit cross contamination with a separate cooking area. This is all fantastic. However, my experience was not consistent with staff being properly trained. And the best way to reduce cross contamination is to not have any animal products in the restaurant. Cooking and prepping in a separate area is nice but helps but is nowhere near as sufficient as an entirely vegan restaurant would be.

The first time I tried to go here I called and the guy hung up on me because he wanted to know who I was when I merely wanted to know if the manager was there. I was calling to see if they would like me to interview them for my channel & I was going to get something to eat there. I called back and explained myself and then he told me that no one is vegan there. I found this odd since they used the word vegan in the name. I explained that and he said "everyone's trying to get on the vegan bandwagon these days". In my mind I'm thinking "then why aren't owners vegan?"

I didn't go on that first attempt. Instead I went to Sprouts Cafe since I get a consistently good meal there. Today I tried going to EJ's again. This time I only wanted dessert. I was assuming surely they would have a dessert. And I would get my wife a meal to go. It took a long time to get help. The hostess didn't know anything about the vegan menu & said it was just the little section on the menu. I found it pretty odd that about 2/13ths of the menu was vegan. But then I realized other parts of the menu have V's next to them, so it was maybe 4/13ths of the menu. The dessert section had a bunch of items that sounded like they could be vegan but they didn't have any V's. The hostess didn't know so I went to the bar. The man behind the bar appeared more interested in the lady who came in after me who was actually on the phone the whole time. He said none of the desserts are vegan.

It's so easy to make vegan desserts. It's so odd they had so many desserts with titles like peach, strawberry, banana, pineapple, and sweet potato that were pies, cakes and cobblers but none of them were vegan. And place has vegan in the name of the restaurant! Even vegan restaurants wonder if they should use the word vegan so a non-vegan restaurant using the word vegan in the title of the restaurant just seems really sketchy. The owners aren't vegan.

Pretty much every restaurant has vegan side items they can turn into a meal. Make vegan desserts. Make at least half the menu vegan. Have someone there who can help a vegan find something they want on the menu. Don't call the place vegan when it absolutely is not. There's no excuse for this, EVERYONE can eat vegan. But, not everyone eats animals.

Are any of the items on the kids menu vegan? There are no V's. They really need to work on this menu design. It blows my mind they would invest so much on a location and then drop the ball on the most important thing, the menu.

Vegans want to support vegans. The owners aren't vegan. We're being misled to believe this is more of a significant vegan experience here and that perhaps they are...

We had heard good things about this restaurant. We decided to try it and were seated around 1PM Sunday. The waitress told us we could order from the brunch menu or the main menu. We both ordered the chicken breast plate with two sides. The food came out quickly and instead of the chicken breast we ordered it was 3 or so wings. The wings were good and hot. One of the sides we ordered was steamed cabbage, the cabbage was served cold. The cornbread was cold and so dry it crumbled with every bite. From other reviews I see here, I can understand the comments about small portions for what you are paying for the food, they were small portions on a small plate for sure. Not long before we were ready to leave, someone came to the table and asked us how the experience was. She did not introduce herself so I don't know if it was a manager or the owner or what. We told her we ordered a Chicken breast plate and got little wings instead. Her response was: Oh I can tell you why we did that, we had a lot of wings leftover from the brunch time menu and we needed to get those wings out. So basically she said we'll give you chicken but not what you ordered because we don't want to waste these little chicken wings we have leftover. They DID NOT come back to the table and tell us that they could not give us what we ordered or ask us if we would like to look at the menu again or change our order, they just decided "they'll deal with wings" that we did not order. If I knew they would not give us what we ordered I would have tried to order something different from the menu. In addition, two men were seated after us at the table behind us were talking and constantly using the "N" word. I realize that kind of language is acceptable to some folks but we certainly did not like it all. To summarize, it felt like they gave us little (less meat) wings instead of the chicken breast we ordered because they had leftover wings they wanted to get rid of and didn't even ask us if we wanted to order something different, they just decided for us, and the two men behind us constantly using the "N" word made for a negative experience. I hope they can make some changes and be successful and stay in that location for a long time. The actual food itself was really good (except for cold steamed cabbage and we didn't get what we ordered) and the service was good and the staff was very friendly.

Thank you very much Mrs Martin for your response and thank you for saying that if you had known you would have fixed the problem. And yes, I agree that the restaurant has little or no control of what kind of language their customers use. One would hope that this day and age (2023) that even young men would know better than to say "Yo N" "What's up N" "N let me tell you this N" "That N told me ....., etc." We will come back for anoher try. The main complaint is that we ordered chicken breast, someone decided "let's give them wings instead". And when we brought it up we were told "the reason we did that was because we had leftover wings from brunch and we needed to get...

EJ's Soul Food and Vegan has come a very long way in a short time with, dare I say, little support from the vegan community; I should know, I'm a vegan in the area and acted as their WFPB vegan consultant as they ramped up to start up thru the first 6 months. I trained both back and front of house teams (restaurant biz is very high turnover) and brought in well known vegan activists and entrepreneurs (many which she worked with) to talk to staff pre-opening about how important it was to recognize veganism as more than just a food preference and the value you of it for wellness. The owner isn't vegan but has never claimed to be, which is why she hired consultants so that she could do it properly. While they aren't vegan they're fully committed to listening to and complying with is needed to ensure no cross contamination whatsoever in every quadrant of their kitchen. From separate prep tables, sinks, fryers to separate shelves in walk in cooler. They are now being bashed for not having vegan desserts when she made them both in house and hired a vegan baker to make them and suffered tremendous product loss for a long time because vegans don't come often. Therefore, she did what any business owner does when something is hemorrhaging money; she removed it from the menu. The main buyer of EJ's vegan food is actually non vegans with the top sellers being a healthy vegan Krabby cake made with hearts of palms and chickpeas and baked not fried in the oven and her creole red beans, which include a little field roast apple sage sausage (vegan). Her collards, yams, rice, cabbage is vegan, creole red beans, crabby cakes w/vegan remoulade, cole slaw (the only mayo ordered in the house is vegan) BBQ jackfruit. She had more vegan items including vegan chicken n waffles and a beyond burger with a vegan bun and alll of these things stay b/c they cross sell to non-vegans or have a good shelf life-this is the restaurant business. What's sad is that vegans bash this lady at all with no concern about how dedicated she's been about keeping things 100% vegan and while they may not know about veganism they respect vegans; even as vegans continue to disrespect her. EJ's vegan options are truly that and their vegan food is well seasoned, full of flavor and not cross contaminated - all the vegan bashing does is run people away who may become vegan in the future. They are a place for sharing memories, spending time with family-I'm proud of EJ's growth and believe in their mission to bring folks together - vegans don't bash her, support her and make requests, she is very...