One in every of Dallas’ high vegan cooks is debuting a brand new restaurant in Richardson: Chef Troy Gardner will open TLC Vegan Cafe, a comfy, informal vegan restaurant with dine-in service and a small marketplace for a seize & go gadgets like sandwiches, desserts, and extra.
It is going into an area with nice vegan karma: the previous residence of Reverie Bakeshop, at 1930 Coit Rd., well-known for its vegan and gluten-free treats. (Reverie relocated to 980 Coit Rd. in June.)
Gardner and his associate Sherry Copeland have utilized for his or her Certificates of Occupancy, and development on the house is already underway. They’re planning to open within the fall.
The cafe is a derivative of TLC Vegan Kitchen, a ghost kitchen idea Gardner founded in 2020 throughout the top of the pandemic.
Gardner is considered one of Dallas’ most enduring figures within the native vegan scene, courting again to 2013 when he opened Samson’s Sizzling Canines with quite a few vegan choices on the menu. He went on to open the extra formal V-Eats Fashionable Vegan at Trinity Groves in 2016, serving consolation meals together with vegan Salisbury steak, sushi, and extra, for which he earned a nomination for Greatest New Restaurant in CultureMap’s 2017 Tastemaker Awards.
He opened TLC as a ghost kitchen in response to the pandemic, working out of Revolving Kitchen in Garland, and has been prospering as a thriving take-out enterprise. TLC was selected as one of many 4 Dallas eating places to serve Tindle, a buzzy plant-based hen, and extra impressively, it won a CultureMap Tastemaker Award in 2021 for Best Ghost Kitchen.
However the alternative to return to serving his meals in a sit-down setting was onerous to withstand.
He is opening it in partnership with Copeland, proprietor of Jai Meals, a meals service featuring vegan meals from completely different cooks for pick-up or residence supply, working on the Retailers at Willow Bend in Plano.
“Sherry and I started working collectively in 2020, once we have been offering meals for her operation,” Gardner says. “She needed to open a storefront outdoors of the mall, and leased the Reverie Bakeshop house after they relocated, and it blossomed into an unintentional partnership.”
TLC stands for “Tastes Like Rooster,” and capitalizes on Gardner’s savvy use of components to approximate the flavour and texture of meat. TLC’s menu consists of gadgets like pizza with cashew mozzarella, chili, chicken-fried steak, and lasagna with three vegan cheeses: ricotta, mozzarella, & parmesan.
“On the new restaurant, we’ll do lots of the dishes we’re at present doing out of Revolving Kitchen, however the seated spaced means I can do common specials, which I get pleasure from however that are troublesome to current on a web based platform,” he says.
Final weekend, he did a particular Crispy Citrus TLC chick’n with their signature oyster-mushroom “chick-nun,” coconut milk rice, Chinese language broccoli, Thai chili, Mandarin oranges, and a “salt bae” sprinkle of sesame seeds.
“Eating out can also be enjoyable, it provides that sense of neighborhood you simply do not get whenever you’re consuming takeout,” he says.
