The economics behind Chicago's plant-based restaurant shakeout
The Illinois Restaurant Association warned in late 2025 that food-service operators citywide were facing severe cumulative financial stress from rising food costs, higher municipal licensing fees, labor retention challenges, and local wage policy shifts — pressures that fall on all restaurant concepts, not just plant-based ones. National retail data suggests consumer appetite for plant-based products hasn't disappeared: plant-based retail sales held roughly steady at $7.9 billion in 2025, down slightly from $8 billion in 2024, with 60% of American households buying plant-based products, according to the Plant Based Foods Institute. According to the Chicago Data Portal, the city publishes data on restaurant inspections, nearby new business licenses and cafe permits.
At the same time, industry data analyzed by SPINS and the Good Food Institute found retail sales of plant-based meat alternatives fell 7% to $1.2 billion in 2024. The data also found that 96% of households buying plant-based meats bought conventional animal products, suggesting most plant-based shoppers are flexitarians rather than strict vegans. According to a 2021 University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign thesis, previous studies identified taste, price and healthiness as some of the most important factors driving consumer acceptance of plant-based meat.
Fancy Plants is still open, but its operating model may change
Fancy Plants Cafe, the vegan coffee shop that has served East Lakeview breakfast sandwiches and dairy-free lattes since 2019, is closing after seven years in business. Chef and owner Kevin Schuder plans to relocate to Los Angeles in November, though the cafe remains open and accepting reservations for now.
Schuder and his team are still looking for a way to keep a vegan cafe running in the existing East Lakeview space, according to VegNews. They are exploring options to transfer ownership or operation rather than simply shutter the location outright. That leaves the storefront's next chapter unresolved while the cafe continues serving its regulars.
Schuder had already scaled back before announcing the cafe's closure, shutting Fancy Plants Kitchen, a full-service dinner and tasting-menu concept in Lincoln Park, in late 2023 to consolidate around the cafe, according to HappyCow.
What Fancy Plants built in East Lakeview
Schuder opened Fancy Plants Cafe in January 2019 in a space that had previously housed Kitchen 17, according to VegNews. The cafe built a loyal following on breakfast sandwiches, daily quiches, wraps, soups and dairy-free lattes. Hoodline covered the cafe's original 2019 opening, when it debuted carrot lox bagels and a plant-based breakfast menu in the neighborhood. Schuder has described Fancy Plants as possibly the first vegan coffee shop in the Midwest, per VegNews.
A move back to the West Coast
Schuder's path back to the West Coast traces to his earlier career there. Before Chicago, he won San Francisco's Vegan Iron Chef competition in 2015 and served as executive chef at the San Francisco vegan restaurant Citizen Fox after starting out at San Francisco's Millennium, according to harm.less.
VegNews reports that Schuder has spent the past year or two working as a private chef and has praised Los Angeles as a sophisticated and collaborative city for vegans. The outlet also reports that he prefers focusing on being a vegan chef rather than a business person. Schuder has parents living in Wisconsin, VegNews notes, and plans to return to Chicago for visits and pop-up dinners after his move.
The local pattern extends beyond one cafe
Fancy Plants' planned exit follows a series of plant-based restaurant closures in Chicago. Four vegan or vegetarian spots — Kitchen 17, Native Foods in the Loop, Chicago Raw in Streeterville, and The Chicago Diner's Logan Square location — announced shutdowns within eight days between late November and early December 2025, according to CBS News. The Chicago Diner, founded in 1983 as one of the city's pioneer plant-based eateries, kept its original Lakeview flagship open while closing the 13-year-old Logan Square outpost, the station reports.
Other closures have accumulated over the past two years. Upton's Naturals permanently closed its West Town cafe, Liberation Kitchen, in June 2025 after 12 years, redirecting company resources toward its packaged-food manufacturing business, according to Men's Journal. PlantX's 6,500-square-foot XMarket in Uptown, once billed as the Midwest's largest vegan food hall with six restaurant vendors, closed permanently in November 2024 after a year in operation because of high overhead costs, per Secret Chicago. Hoodline reported on that closure in a 2024 XMarket food hall shutdown story, noting that Bloom Plant-Based Kitchen operated a vegan sushi counter inside the food hall.
Some operators have responded by broadening their menus. Bloom Plant Based Kitchen later closed as a plant-based restaurant, and chef Rodolfo Cuadros reopened the Wicker Park space in February 2026 as Port Union, a concept that incorporates meat alongside global vegetarian dishes, according to WTTW. Chicago Pizza also closed as a plant-based restaurant, part of the same wave reshaping the city's meat-free dining scene.
For now, Fancy Plants Cafe is still serving East Lakeview while Schuder and his team seek someone to keep a vegan cafe operating in the space. Whether another operator takes over the cafe remains open.
