The Most Overrated ‘Vegan-Friendly’ Cities (That Let Me Down)
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I once ate bread and fruit for four days in a city that appears on every Top Vegan Destinations list going. 🫠
Those lists are mostly written by people counting how many vegan restaurants a city has, not how easy it is to eat there when you’re tired, it’s nine at night, and you’re nowhere near the trendy district.
Five cities I genuinely enjoyed visiting and found harder to eat in than anyone warned me. This isn’t a list of bad cities. It’s a list of overrated reputations.
✈️ 1. Paris, France
Paris has excellent vegan bakeries. It has about six of them, and they’re all in the same two arrondissements.
Step outside that and French cooking is built on butter, cream and stock. Even the vegetable sides are usually finished in butter.
The other issue is cultural. Asking for modifications reads as rude in a lot of French restaurants, so you get the raised eyebrow before you get the answer.
What worked: falafel in the Marais, and eating my main meal at lunch when the vegan places were open.
✈️ 2. Tokyo, Japan
Everyone assumes Japan is easy because of the tofu and the vegetables. The problem is dashi.
Dashi is fish stock and it’s the base of almost everything, including the miso soup, the vegetable dishes and most dipping sauces. It isn’t considered an ingredient worth mentioning, because to most kitchens it simply isn’t one.
There are brilliant vegan places in Tokyo and shojin ryori, the Buddhist temple cuisine, is genuinely spectacular. You just have to seek both out deliberately.
What worked: a printed card explaining dashi and katsuobushi in Japanese. Worth more than any app.
✈️ 3. Buenos Aires, Argentina
This one was entirely my own fault. I’d read that Buenos Aires was changing and chose to believe it.
It is still, overwhelmingly, a steak city. Vegetarian generally meant pasta with cream, and vegan mostly meant a confused pause.
I lived on bread, fruit and the snacks in my bag. This is the trip that made me never travel without them again.
What worked: empanadas de verdura, once I’d checked they weren’t made with lard, and the produce markets.
✈️ 4. Barcelona, Spain
Barcelona has good vegan restaurants. What it doesn’t have is vegan options in normal restaurants, which is a different thing entirely.
Tapas culture should work well for this and mostly doesn’t. Jamón is in more dishes than you’d expect, the padrón peppers are often cooked in the same pan, and half the vegetable tapas arrive with a fried egg on top.
What worked: patatas bravas with the aioli left off, escalivada, and pan con tomate. Good food, and you do get tired of it by day four.
✈️ 5. New York City, USA
New York has more vegan restaurants than anywhere on this list. It’s still on it, and I’ll defend this.
They’re scattered across five boroughs, they’re expensive, and the good ones need booking. Being vegan in New York is easy if you plan. It’s surprisingly annoying if you’re hungry, on foot, and somewhere residential.
For a city with this reputation, I expected fewer 25 dollar salads.
What worked: the halal carts, the dollar slice places that do a plain marinara, and Chinatown. Cheap, everywhere, and no booking required.
🌱 What I Learned
- Vegan friendly and vegan easy are different things. Counting restaurants tells you nothing about how spread out they are.
- Trendy doesn’t mean practical. A city with twelve great vegan places can still leave you hungry at ten at night.
- Pack the snacks. Always. Buenos Aires taught me this and I’ve never unlearned it.
What I carry now: GoMacro bars because they survive a rucksack, almonds for something savoury, roasted chickpea snacks for the same reason, and Larabars when I want something sweet. My B12 goes in the same pocket, because travel is when I forget it.
When you see a city on a Top Vegan Destinations list, check where those restaurants actually are before you book somewhere on the other side of town.
Where’s the hardest place you’ve eaten as a vegan? I’m collecting these. 💚
🛒 What I Carry Now
Buenos Aires taught me this and I have never unlearned it.
- GoMacro bars: survives a week at the bottom of a rucksack, which is the only spec that matters.
- Larabars: dates and nuts, nothing else. For when you want sweet.
- Roasted chickpea snacks: savoury, which matters more than you think on day four of sweet bars.
- Almonds: the cheapest way to turn a bad food day into a survivable one.
- Seaweed snacks: packs flat, weighs nothing, and genuinely useful in Japan.
- A B12 supplement: travel is when I forget it. It lives in the same pocket as my passport now.
📚 More Vegan Tips
- The Worst Countries To Visit As A Vegan
- 7 Common Vegan Mistakes That Secretly Deplete Your Iron
- Caught Off Guard: 7 Vegan Label Mistakes I Made and What I Learned
- 9 Unexpectedly Luxurious Vegan Fabrics Changing Haute Couture
