A trendy new crop of restaurants and stores may be great for Instagram pictures, but not everyone approves
Not everyone is on board with Parkdale’s rebranding as “Vegandale.” After a community conflict this summer, what, if anything, has changed?
“Vegandale” is a chain of restaurants, bars and a clothing store in a three-block stretch of Queen Street West between Dufferin and Brock streets, that caused a stir this summer when they received backlash from community organizations.
A community forum was held on August 4 called “Parkdale isn’t Vegandale,” organized by Parkdale Life, an anonymous Instagram account with 40.5K followers, and Parkdale Neighbourhood Land Trust, a non-profit organization for affordable housing.
Community forum this weekend more info here: https://t.co/poywNlQaxj pic.twitter.com/zTObvdYSTx
— parkdalelife (@parkdalelife) July 31, 2018
In response to the forum, the managing chain for the vegan restaurants, called The 5700 Inc., committed $100,000 to community initiatives over six years and to working to hire more Parkdale locals.
In a statement, Parkdale Life says there have been “no updates” on the $100 thousand commitment that The 5700 Inc. made in August of this year.
“It’s up to the neighbourhood to keep them accountable, since they don’t seem to be proactive at all,” Parkdale Life said in a statement about the chain of vegan restaurants.
Parkdale Life said that since the community forum, the expansion of Vegandale has “slowed down a bit,” but that they have yet to see concrete change.
“The hope remains that they make more of an effort to give back to the community, and that they change their obnoxious name. Few of their customers are people who live in the neighborhood, so as for their impact on actual people who live in Parkdale, they are mostly a gentrifying nuisance,” the organization said.
The 5700 Inc. and Parkdale Neighbourhood Land Trust were unavailable for comment at the time of this publication.
There is no confirmed date for the vegan restaurant chain’s newest addition, Prohibition, although the Vegandale website says the restaurant was slated to open in Summer 2018
Madi Kreuger, a fifth-year sociology student at Ryerson, has lived lived in the Parkdale neighbourhood for two years.
Kreamer said since living in the neighbourhood, there has seemed to be new restaurants “popping up” on that stretch of Queen Street.
The first of the Vegandale restaurants opened at the end 2017, with five new stores opening in 2018. The current Vegandale roster now include six stores total, including the Vegandale Brewery, Copenhagen Vegan Cafe & Bakery, Mythology, Not Your Mother, Doonies and The Imperative.
Kraemer says she’s “not against vegan restaurants,” but is concerned with the scale and speed that the Vegandale stores were built.
“I feel like most people are against it,” Kreamer said, “most people that are actually in the neighbourhood [are] not into it because it’s all about gentrification, which kind ruins the whole neighbourhood.”
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