The MBLT vegan sandwich

Trend spot: Vegan food

The words we use to describe eating less meat and more veg – vegetarian, vegan, flexitarian, pescatarian, seagan, plant-based, clean-eating (shudder) – may have changed over the past 18 months but the trend itself is stronger than ever. These days, more and more of us are choosing a veggie-forward diet, whether for ethical or sustainable reasons, budget requirements or just because we prefer the taste and variety.

Nowhere is the vegan food trend more evident than in New York City (Read our guide to the best vegan restaurants in NYC), which we visited late in 2017 with the M&S trend team. Each year they visit the Big Apple for inspiration for the supermarket’s latest ranges – and for 2018 they reckon the big trend is normalising vegan food. Across the city we saw vegan options everywhere, from fast-food joints and takeaway lunch counters to high-end, fine-dining restaurants, often with little labelling. One of our favourite vegan places that we visited was By CHLOE. Its flagship restaurant opened in Manhattan two years ago, and there are now 10 across the US, with an 11th due to open in London’s Covent Garden in January. We tried an incredible pesto meatball sub there, made with portobello mushrooms and veggies, marinara sauce, cashew mozzarella and almond parmesan, and a kale caesar salad with maple-wheat croutons, a creamy dressing and a revolutionary shiitake bacon (pictured below). Crisp wafers of ’shroom, packed with umami, with that same chewy, sweet and smoky crunch you get from the porky kind.