Nearly three years after shutting its doors, Souley Vegan is back in Oakland — and this time it's not just a restaurant. Chef and owner Tamearra Dyson reopened her plant-based Louisiana Creole kitchen at 101 Broadway in Jack London Square, just blocks from the original address where she first built the brand into a local institution.
The comeback became official with a “Rebirth” celebration held on July 25, according to San Francisco Bay View, marking the restaurant's return to the same waterfront district where it spent 14 years serving what Dyson calls soulful, scratch-made comfort food. Dyson recently sat down with host Jessica Wills on KRON4's Live! In The Bay to share a taste of the cooking and talk about what comes next for the nationally recognized restaurant, which has served plant-based Louisiana Creole cuisine for nearly 20 years.
From $30 in the Register to a National Spotlight
Dyson's path to reopening has been anything but conventional. She founded Souley Vegan in 2009 after leaving nursing school and a career in medicine, opening the original Oakland spot completely self-funded with just $30 in the cash register, according to Black Enterprise. She had taught herself to cook vegan food starting at age 18, long before plant-based dining became a mainstream draw in Oakland.
That grassroots reputation eventually carried her to national television. In January 2022, Dyson became the first plant-based chef to win Food Network's Beat Bobby Flay in the show's 28-season history, defeating Flay with a seitan-based double-decker burger — a victory that was unanimous, and one that ended with Flay tying his own apron on her as a tribute, per the same account cited by Mashed.
A Closure, a Hiatus, and a Wave of Bay Area Losses
The original Souley Vegan closed in October 2023 after 14 years in business, done in by financial pressures, declining foot traffic, and the lingering economic disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, as Hoodline reported at the time. A community GoFundMe campaign that fall raised more than $11,000 in an effort to save the original location, but it wasn't enough. Before the shutdown, Souley Vegan had also expanded into ghost kitchens and satellite spots in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Las Vegas, all of which closed as the post-pandemic restaurant industry shifted, according to Wikipedia's entry on the restaurant. A planned Cajun bar extension behind the Oakland location, called The Back Porch, was abandoned before it ever opened.
Souley Vegan's struggles were not unique. Its 2023 closure came amid a broader wave of Bay Area vegan restaurant closures, as rising real estate, labor and ingredient costs forced several long-standing plant-based institutions in San Francisco and Oakland to shut down around the same time, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. Before it closed, Souley Vegan had consistently ranked among the top four most popular businesses in Jack London Square, a neighborhood that has otherwise seen notable commercial turnover in recent years.
Souley Vegan 2.0: More Than a Dining Room
The new 101 Broadway space is built around a broader concept than the original restaurant. It includes a full bar, an open kitchen, event space, commercial kitchen rentals for up-and-coming chefs, and youth mentoring programs, according to a description Dyson gave that SFist reported on. Dyson has referred to the expanded concept as Souley Vegan 2.0, framing the new location as a community hub as much as a place to eat.
The food itself still leans on Dyson's scratch-cooking philosophy. Souley Vegan makes its own sauces and proteins in-house, including signature dishes like Deez Ain't Gator Bites, made from housemade Louisiana hot links and mushrooms, and hearts-of-palm calamari — a menu built to avoid relying on pre-packaged commercial meat substitutes.
A Shifting Customer Base and a Bigger Mission
Dyson has long tied her cooking to a broader mission around food justice and health education in Black communities. When Souley Vegan first opened in 2009, its customer base was about 95% white; by 2020, Black patrons made up roughly 60% of diners, a shift Wikipedia's entry on the restaurant frames as evidence of changing plant-based dining habits in Oakland.
Whether an independent vegan restaurant can sustain that mission long-term amid continued inflationary pressure on rent, labor and ingredients remains an open question for the Bay Area's food scene, one that has already claimed several of Souley Vegan's peers. But with an established local following, a national television win behind her, and a business model now built around more than just plates of food, Dyson's reopening in Jack London Square arrives as one of Oakland's more closely watched restaurant comebacks.
