Ravi DeRossi, the restaurateur behind Death and Co, Avant Garden, Mother of Pearl and 12 other bars and restaurants around the city, is making a serious push to turn all of his operations fully animal-free. He’ll be starting by expanding the already vegan Avant Garden into multiple spinoff concepts, as well as closing the charcuterie-focused The Bourgeois Pig and reopening it as vegan wine and tapas bar LadyBird. All of his restaurants are in for some sort of shake-up, and it seems his mixologists won’t be safe either, as cocktail and beer lists will be purged of the often ignored animal ingredients that are sometimes used in drinks.
DeRossi himself has a long history with veganism, and feels passionately about the environmental and animal welfare impacts of factory farming. Before becoming involved in the hospitality industry, he spent many years living completely meat-free. As he describes to Eater, “You don’t realize that the average restaurateur does three times more destruction [to the environment] than the average person,” and, “If we’re going to do something to help this planet, it needs to start. It needs to be me not just preaching, but me just doing it. I’m in the position to do it.”
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