“], “filter”: { “nextExceptions”: “img, blockquote, div”, “nextContainsExceptions”: “img, blockquote”} }”>
Get access to everything we publish when you sign up for Outside+
>”,”name”:”in-content-cta”,”type”:”link”}}”>Join today!.
It was as if Pinky Cole, the entrepreneur, restaurateur, philanthropist, and CEO of Slutty Vegan and Bar Vegan, had been preparing for the marathon of her life.
“I was running five miles a day, reading a book a day, and I just knew that I was getting ready to do something,” Cole tells me. “I was in a space where I knew something big was about to happen, but I didn’t know what it was.”
One day amidst her search for that something, she found herself sitting on her then-boyfriend’s couch in Atlanta. Though she says she’s usually not a smoker, she took a hit of his blunt — and, then, she recalls, the idea struck like a lightning bolt. At that moment, Slutty Vegan was born.
Just three weeks after what Cole now refers to as “the blunt worth 100 million dollars,” she was cooking. The marathon began in July of 2018, with Cole cooking out of her home kitchen. Very quickly she expanded to renting a commercial kitchen space and sending her vegan burgers and fries out to customers via delivery apps, then came the first of what would be several food trucks.
That October, the first brick-and-mortar Slutty Vegan opened in Atlanta. Now there are eight locations and more coming soon, spread across multiple states. When the latest Slutty Vegan opened in Brooklyn, Eater reported it was greeted with hours-long lines and a block party that shut down a chunk of Fort Greene. Customers seem unable to get enough of her vegan burgers on Hawaiian buns, and the way they combine sweet, spicy, and tangy flavors.
She pauses to reflect back on her start. “Damn, I really grew a multimillion dollar business not knowing what the hell I was doing, literally,” she says, smiling. “Like, half the time, I don’t know what I’m doing, and it works.”
How well it all works is a testament to Cole’s tenacity, and the degree of trust she has in herself and in the universe to carry her visions from brainstorm to reality. “I have a lot of self confidence,” she confirms. “And I believe that my mouthpiece, more than the food, will take this business to the billion dollar mark.”
Cole made her first foray into food with a Jamaican restaurant in Harlem, New York. That project, opened in 2014, spoke to her Jamaican heritage, but as someone who grew up with a Rastafarian mother, and on a primarily vegetarian and holistic diet, her heart wasn’t fully in the restaurant. She’s never eaten pork, and stopped eating beef at 13. By the time she launched that restaurant, she had gone vegan.
“What I realized is that when I had that restaurant, while it was good, and people had a good experience, it was fake. It was fake, because I was lying to the people. And I realized that you’ll never go far when you lie to the people,” reflects Cole. “Why would I sell something that I don’t eat, right? The reason why Slutty Vegan works is because I am really vegan, I like my friends to eat vegan, and I want to see their reaction.”
After a devastating kitchen fire in 2016, Pinky’s Jamaican Restaurant closed. Next month, she’ll open a Slutty Vegan in Harlem, just blocks away from where it once stood.
Community is at the heart of so much of what Cole does — both in her restaurants and through her philanthropic work. Founded in 2019, The Pinky Cole Foundation focuses on “empowering generations of color to win in life, financially, and in the pursuit of their entrepreneurial dreams.” The foundation offers training programs in business and financial literacy for young people with the goal of helping underserved communities build wealth. The foundation mobilized quickly to help establish college scholarship funds and provide other resources for the children of Rayshard Brooks, a Black man killed by an Atlanta police officer in 2020.
Recently, the foundation partnered with Vero bank to establish LLC corporations for every 2022 graduate of Clark Atlanta University, a historically Black institution. Delivering the school’s commencement address, Cole, herself a Clark Atlanta alum, told the crowd, “Every single graduate in this audience will leave this stadium as a business owner. I didn’t have a plan, but I’m going to make sure that you do.”
Next up for the indefatigable Cole is the launch of her first cookbook. Available for pre-order now, Eat Plants, B*tch! is packed with plant-based recipes like her black pea cauliflower po’ boy and oyster mushroom parm — but it’s a book primarily created, she says, for the meat-eater’s kitchen.
“The vegans already got it figured out, right? I don’t have to persuade them to add in more vegan options to their menu,” she explains. “I got to talk to the people just eating pork rinds and pork and beef and chicken. Those are the people I need to tap into. Because if I can get them to shift their mindset, then the race has been won.”
And, like everything she does, even her promotion of the book will be a little bit extra. Instead of the typical bookshop signings, the “Pinky Cole Experience Tour” will stop at theaters and venues across the country — rooms with capacities well over 1,000 people — for food demonstrations, musical performances, talks by Cole and her collaborators, and surprise appearances by some of Slutty Vegan’s many celebrity fans. As Cole gears up for the tour’s November 14th kick-off in New York, this mother of two says she feels ready for what’s to come.
“This chapter in my life is called unstoppable. Because there ain’t nothing I can’t do.”
READ ALL RESTAURANT STORIES FROM VEGETARIAN TIMES
Get more of what you love from VT. Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter and sign up for our email newsletters.
