One of my favorite vegan destination/weekend trips from Charlotte is definitely Asheville. It’s just an easy two hour drive and they have plenty of solid vegan options and delicious beer to keep you well fed for the weekend. Sadly, this trip we didn’t make it to one of our usual favorites, Rosetta’s Kitchen, but I blame them for not being open at all on Sunday. Sitting at the bar downstairs and sipping on a flight of Buchi while enjoying some buffalo tofu definitely has a place in my ideal life.
Ultra Coffeebar
One of the newest additions in our Asheville rotation is Ultra Coffeebar. A cool little coffee shop located in the River Arts District. Check out their menu here with it’s beautifully labeled vegan options.
The vegan buffalo tempeh wrap and bahn mi are my suggested orders over the avocado toast and veganized Western Man Wrap. They do also offer vegan cream cheese and tempeh bacon as well, so they have good options for breakfast or lunch.
This tends to be our final morning stop…before picking up a few vegan doughnuts from Vortex.
Bonfire Barbecue
One of the new spots we tried this trip that deserves a return trip was Bonfire BBQ.
While this is definitely a traditional BBQ joint, they do offer a Vegan BBQ plate featuring No Evil Foods vegan meat.
The servers weren’t incredibly helpful with pointing out the vegan sides and we didn’t trust their confirmation that the hush puppies were vegan, but the vegan BBQ was fantastic. We were told the french fries, beans and Brussel sprouts were vegan. The Brussels do come in a sauce that does contain honey which you can substitute.
We ordered the ‘meat’ dry so we could try whatever sauce we wanted. The vegan BBQ was amazing with a little Ghost Pepper BBQ sauce. I want to open a vegan BBQ shack in Charlotte after eating this stuff.
Farm Burger
This small chain offers a preset Vegan Burger (sea island red pea, smiling hara smoked tempeh, black eyed pea burger, clover sprouts, red cabbage, basil tofu spread) or you can build-your-own using the vegan patty. It was good…but definitely not my top choice when in Asheville, a nice fast food option. One order of fries would have fed two people (not quite Five Guys plethora of fries, but enough to get us by). I didn’t really care for the sweet potato fries at all.
