Fancy Plants Cafe
Cafe · Lakeview East ·
Vegan cafe with coffee, tea, sandwiches, pastries, and bagels
Vegan cafe with coffee, tea, sandwiches, pastries, and bagels
"Imagine a coffee shop that doesn’t upcharge customers for non-dairy products. Customers can have that and more at vegan chef Kevin Schuder’s cafe along Briar, just south of the busy Belmont and Broadway intersection. Schuder’s fine dining experiences come through with an assortment of vegan pastries that will have you question if it’s not butter. Be on the look out for the occasional pop-up dinner where Schuder stretches out his legs for a dose of vegan fine dining." - Marla Rose
"Fancy Plants Cafe’s owner Kevin Schuder spent much of the week trying to reach Dom’s and Foxtrot to connect them with the Greater Chicago Food Depository but had no luck, and he expressed particular frustration after reports that workers were instructed to throw away food rather than donate it." - Ashok Selvam
"In Lakeview, I note that Fancy Plants Cafe is Schuder’s tiny original restaurant that’s temporarily closed while he concentrates on the Lincoln Park location; it should reopen soon. The cafe is known for pastries, sandwiches, bagels and carrot lox (items now being served at the Lincoln Park spot), and it was the small kitchen from which Schuder frequently launched pop-up dinners and experimented with plated meals and vegan burgers." - Aimee Levitt
"In Lakeview I learned that Fancy Plants Cafe is a tiny, 710-square-foot spot opened in January 2019 that has become a go-to for Chicago’s vegan community for its pastries, breakfast sandwiches, specialty coffee and tea — but what really stands out is chef Kevin Schuder’s experimental, multicourse approach to plant-based cooking. While his dinners draw on Japanese, Greek, Korean, Italian, Spanish and Burmese influences, it’s his vegan burger — made from lentils and nori, grown together with tempeh and a koji culture to create umami, new proteins and the right crumble and chew — that commands attention; Schuder developed it in part during a 50-day COVID closure and positions the process as more natural and energy-efficient than many commercial plant-based products. I also learned that he makes house-cultured vegan cheeses (including a Roquefort-cultured blue that he ages for a month and which he praises as “killer” on the burger), ferments and experiments with koji (even making miso from fresh masa), bakes melty cashew burrata inside a corn muffin, uses almond feta in spanakopita, layers cashew mozzarella and smoked lentils in lasagna, and composes a complex chili with lentil tempeh, black-bean miso and smoked poblanos and jalapeños — all reflecting his goal to create a new language of vegan cooking and to scale the burger via a larger prep/central kitchen for future locations." - Lisa Shames
"A vegan coffee shop and restaurant marking the inauguration by giving away a few hundred of its new vegan burgers on Wednesday from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m.; the cafe will also offer outdoor dining and drinking with heat lamps. The event is framed as a full-circle moment for chef Kevin Schuder—who held a potluck after the 2016 election—and celebrates the cafe’s growth from that grassroots gathering into a brick-and-mortar spot with its own signature burger." - Naomi Waxman