One of the perks of living in a city like Milwaukee is that thoughtful vegan and vegetarian menu items are never too hard to find. Finding an all-vegetarian restaurant, however, is another story. One of the only ones near Downtown is the Riverwest Co-Op Café (733 E. Clarke St.), which since 2004 has been catering to the neighborhood’s herbivores. Every item on the menu is vegan by default, though a few can be made with cheese or an egg by request.
“Vegan and vegetarian is the only thing we do,” says co-op member Todd Leech, who assistant manages the café. “Our pots, our pans, our stovetops, our grills and our knives have never touched meat. So you don’t have somebody cooking hamburgers right next to the barbecue tofu.”
Staffed by a mix of paid employees and volunteers, the kitchen serves the staples you’d expect from a vegetarian café—bean burritos, veggie sandwiches, salads and the like—as well as some more worldly offerings, like a bahn mi and Korean bi bim bop. Everything on the menu is less than $10 and the portions are generous, to say the least. One of the café’s bestsellers is its vegan pancakes, each of which is the size of a hefty plate. The kitchen uses almost all organic ingredients.
“We’re looking for good, clean produce—nothing that uses chemical fertilizers or any kind of non-organic input,” says Leech. “And whenever possible, we source locally. Some of our best farms are within 40 minutes of the co-op.”
The café’s menu is a permanent work in progress. Since the co-op’s mission is to serve the community, Leech says, the café is constantly adding and tweaking menu items based on customer feedback, and often humors requests that might be met with eye rolls at commercial kitchens.
“We’re a community restaurant, so we welcome the kind of input that other restaurants might turn their noses up at,” Leech says. “For instance, we were using kimchi in our bi bim bop, and a local guy came in and told us that he made his own, so we started using that. Some of our costumers noticed the change and gave us some feedback, so we shared it with him and he tweaked the recipe in response.”
The café also recently added a kids’ menu in response to customer requests. These kinds of changes are easy to implement, Leech says, because the café operates by a simple consensus—if the co-op’s owners committee sees room for improvement, they act on it. Just about the only change that’s completely off the table is the idea of serving meat. The café has always been all-vegetarian, and it intends to stay that way.
“We’ve got a very loyal customer base and an ever-expanding customer base,” Leech says. “We get a lot of suggestions for a lot of things, but we never get folks coming in demanding prime rib.”
