Plan Your Trip. Stay Vegan Anywhere.
Verified vegan restaurant guides, day-by-day itineraries, and the practical stuff — airline meals, road trip food, language cards — for 12 cities and counting.
No more scrolling through eight-year-old forum threads at midnight in a hotel room. Pick your city, and we’ll tell you where to eat, what to see, and what to pack.
Eat well.
Go further.
What Is a Vegan Travel Guide, and Why Do You Need One?
A vegan travel guide is a city-specific resource that tells you where to eat plant-based meals, which attractions and neighbourhoods fit around those meals, and what logistical problems to plan for — airline meal requests, grocery access, language barriers, and cross-contamination risks. A general travel guide tells you a city has great food. A vegan travel guide tells you whether you can actually eat it.
That gap is the reason this site exists.
Most travel content is written by people who don’t think about food restrictions at all. Most vegan content is written by people who cook at home. Neither helps you much when you’ve landed in a city at 9pm, your hotel’s restaurant is closed, and the only thing open is a place whose entire menu is built on butter.
Every guide here is written to solve that specific problem. Our city guides cover vegan-friendliness honestly — including the cities where it’s genuinely hard. Our restaurant guides name actual dishes to order, not just addresses. Our itineraries build meals into the plan instead of leaving you to figure it out at 2pm when everything good has a 90-minute wait.
And when the trip itself is the hard part, our travel tips cover the things nobody warns you about: how airline vegan meals actually work, what to do on a road trip through somewhere with no options, and how to explain “no dairy, no eggs” in a language you don’t speak.
That is the difference between a generic travel list and a useful vegan city guide: fewer surprises, better meals, and a fallback when plans change.
Start With a City
Every destination guide follows the same three-part structure, so you always know where to find what you need: a city overview (is it vegan-friendly, when to visit, what to know), a restaurant guide (verified, with dishes named), and an itinerary (meals already built in).
North America
Los Angeles — Probably the easiest major city in the world to eat vegan in, and that abundance is its own problem. Our guide cuts 200+ options down to the ones actually worth your limited meals. See the full restaurant list or the 3-day itinerary.
Chicago — A city with a deep-dish reputation and a much better vegan scene than that reputation suggests. Neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood, with cold-weather eating strategy included.
New York City — Five boroughs, no shortage of options, and a real risk of spending your whole trip in one neighbourhood. Our guide is organised by where you’ll actually be.
Austin — Barbecue city with a surprisingly strong plant-based counter-scene. Includes the food trucks worth crossing town for.
Portland — Arguably the highest vegan-options-per-capita city in the US. Also the easiest place to get overwhelmed by choice.
San Francisco — Expensive, excellent, and worth planning around. Includes day-trip options into Sonoma and the coast.
Toronto — Genuinely underrated, with strong options across Asian, Caribbean, and Middle Eastern cuisines.
Europe
London — One of the best vegan cities in Europe, with the caveat that “vegan option available” and “worth eating” are different things. We separate them.
Berlin — Consistently ranked among the most vegan-friendly cities on earth, and it earns it. Our guide covers the neighbourhoods where that’s actually true.
Barcelona — Harder than people expect, easier than the tapas stereotype suggests. Includes what to say when “vegetariano” isn’t enough.
Lisbon — Rapidly improving, still requires planning. Worth it.
Asia
Bangkok — Abundant vegetarian food, but fish sauce and shrimp paste are everywhere. This is the guide where our language cards earn their keep.
See all destinations → — including North America, Europe, and Asia.
Find Somewhere to Eat
Restaurant guides are the pages people come back to, so we treat them differently from everything else.
Every restaurant we list has been verified within the last six months — we check that it’s still open, still serving the dishes we named, and still worth the trip. Each entry tells you what to order, roughly what you’ll pay, which neighbourhood it’s in, and whether it’s fully vegan or a mixed kitchen with reliable vegan options. That last distinction matters more than most guides admit: a fully vegan kitchen removes cross-contamination worry entirely, while a mixed kitchen with one good dish is a different kind of meal.
We also flag the places that aren’t fully vegan but are worth your time anyway — the excellent Lebanese place where half the mezze menu happens to be plant-based, the Ethiopian restaurant where fasting food is the default. These are usually the best meals on any trip, and vegan-only lists systematically miss them.
Browse by city:
- Los Angeles vegan restaurants
- Chicago vegan restaurants
- London vegan restaurants
- Leeds vegan restaurants
- Paris vegan restaurants
- Seattle vegan restaurants
Not in a city we cover yet? Our guide to ordering vegan abroad covers the questions to ask and the phrases that actually work, wherever you are.
Itineraries With the Meals Already Built In
Most itineraries treat food as an afterthought. They’ll send you to a neighbourhood at 1pm with no thought to whether there’s anything there you can eat, and you end up in a supermarket buying crisps because the next stop is 40 minutes away and you’re out of time.
Ours are built the other way around. We plan the meals first, then arrange the sightseeing around them — because a good vegan restaurant is often the thing you travelled for, and because a badly-timed lunch can wreck an afternoon.
Each itinerary gives you a day-by-day plan with realistic timings, a rough cost estimate, and named dishes at each meal stop. Every one includes a fallback option for each meal, because restaurants close unexpectedly and “the place we planned is shut” shouldn’t end your day.
- 3 days in Los Angeles — geographically grouped, because LA traffic will otherwise eat your trip
- 3 days in Chicago — with indoor alternatives for the months that need them
- 3 days in New York City — organised by borough, not by attraction ranking
- 3 days in London — including the markets worth planning a meal around
Building your own instead? Use the city guide for context, the restaurant guide for options, and the packing list to cover the gaps. And whatever you plan, carry something shelf-stable — see our travel snacks guide for what survives a day in a bag.
The Practical Stuff Nobody Tells You
Finding a good restaurant is the easy part. The hard part is the 14 hours before you get there.
Flying Vegan
Airline vegan meals are a system with rules, and almost nobody explains them. The meal code you want is VGML (vegan vegetarian meal), not VLML (lacto-ovo vegetarian, which includes dairy and eggs) — and the two get confused constantly, including by airline staff. Most carriers require the request 24 to 48 hours before departure, and a request made at check-in usually arrives as a fruit plate, if it arrives at all.
Our complete airline vegan meal guide breaks down the meal codes, the request deadlines by airline, and what to do when the meal doesn’t show up. Pair it with our long-haul flight food guide and the airport food guide for the gap between security and gate.
Road Trips and Long Drives
Highway food is where most vegan travel plans fall apart. There’s no app that reliably tells you which gas station 40 miles ahead has something you can eat.
Our vegan road trip guide covers the planning approach — where to stock up, what keeps without refrigeration, how far apart to space real meals. Our vegan fast food guide covers the chains that genuinely have something, and what to order at each. And if you’re heading somewhere with no infrastructure at all, the vegan camping and hiking food guide handles that.
Language and Ordering Abroad
“I’m vegan” translates badly. In many countries it lands as “vegetarian,” which lands as “no visible meat,” which arrives as a dish cooked in butter with a fish-sauce base.
Our vegan language cards are free, printable, and cover ten languages — each one written to say what you actually need to say, which is closer to “no meat, no fish, no dairy, no eggs, no honey” than to any single word. Download them, screenshot them, and stop relying on a translation app with no signal.
See all travel tips → — including the vegan packing list, the vegan cruise guide, and travelling vegan on a budget.
What to Pack, Buy, and Bring
Half of eating well on a trip happens before you leave.
We test and review the vegan products that matter when you’re away from your own kitchen — what survives a day in a backpack, what you can find in a foreign supermarket, and what’s worth the suitcase space.
Travel-critical:
- Best vegan travel snacks — what actually holds up in transit
- Best vegan protein powder — including which ones pack down small
- Printable vegan grocery list — for the first supermarket run in a new city
For the kitchen you come home to:
- Best vegan cheese brands — tested and ranked, with the ones worth the money separated from the ones that aren’t
- Best non-dairy milk — by use case, because the best one for coffee isn’t the best one for cereal
- Best dairy-free yogurt
- Best vegan meal delivery services — for the week you get back and don’t want to cook
Gear and extras:
- Vegan travel toiletries — cruelty-free and TSA-sized
- Non-leather luggage
- Travel-friendly vegan recipes — including hotel room meals with no kitchen
How We Research Our Guides
Every recommendation on this site comes from one of three places: somewhere we’ve eaten, something we’ve tested, or a source we’ve verified and cited. There is no fourth category.
Restaurants are visited or verified before they’re listed, and re-checked at least every six months. Every restaurant guide carries a visible “verified” date at the top — if that date is stale, the page hasn’t been checked, and we’d rather you know that than assume.
Products are bought at retail and tested, not sent to us by brands in exchange for coverage. Rankings are based on how they perform, including for travel specifically.
Logistics information — airline meal codes, request deadlines, visa-adjacent food rules — is sourced directly from carriers and operators, with links, and dated. This stuff changes, and undated logistics advice is worse than none.
Corrections get made fast and marked clearly. If a restaurant we recommended has closed, changed hands, or stopped being vegan-friendly, tell us and we’ll fix it.
Read our full research and ranking methodology, or learn about the people writing these guides.
New to Vegan Travel? Start Here
If this is your first trip as a vegan — or your first trip somewhere you’re nervous about — don’t start with a city guide. Start with the fundamentals.
Our Start Here guide walks through the whole thing in order: how far ahead to plan, what to research before booking, how to request meals, what to pack, and how to handle the trip where it all goes wrong anyway and you end up eating chips for dinner. (It happens. It’s survivable. There’s a plan for it.)
Three pages to read before any trip:
- The vegan travel packing list — free and printable
- How airline vegan meals work — request it before you need it
- Vegan language cards — ten languages, download once, use forever
Where This Goes Next
VeganJourneyMap covers 12 cities today. That number is deliberate — we’d rather publish twelve guides we’ve actually verified than sixty scraped from review sites and recycled listicles.
New cities go live roughly every two weeks, and each one ships complete: overview, restaurant guide, and itinerary together. A half-finished destination guide isn’t useful to anyone, so we don’t publish one.
Coming next: Seattle, Denver, Melbourne, Mexico City, and Tokyo — along with deeper coverage of the cities already here, since a three-day guide to New York is barely a start.
Existing guides get re-verified on a rolling six-month cycle. When a restaurant closes or a meal policy changes, the page changes with it, and the verification date at the top tells you when that last happened.
If there’s a city you want covered, or a restaurant we’ve got wrong, tell us. Reader corrections are how half our updates get flagged, and they’re the fastest way to make a guide better.
Get new city guides by email → · Follow along on Pinterest and Instagram
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Frequently Asked Questions
Is it hard to travel as a vegan?
It depends almost entirely on where you go and how much you plan. Major cities in North America, Western Europe, and Southeast Asia are straightforward with an hour of preparation. Rural areas, smaller cities, and regions where dairy is central to the cuisine take more work. The single biggest predictor of a difficult trip isn’t the destination — it’s arriving without having looked anything up.
What are the most vegan-friendly cities to visit?
Berlin, London, Los Angeles, Portland, and Bangkok consistently rank near the top for options per head, though “most options” and “best experience” aren’t the same thing. Our city guides cover vegan-friendliness honestly for each destination, including where it’s genuinely difficult.
How do I order a vegan meal on a flight?
Request the VGML (vegan vegetarian) meal code with your airline, ideally at booking and at least 24 to 48 hours before departure. Don’t request VLML — that’s lacto-ovo vegetarian and includes dairy and eggs. Confirm the request 48 hours out, and bring backup food regardless. Full detail in our airline vegan meal guide.
How do I say “I’m vegan” in another language?
Translating the word itself usually isn’t enough, because “vegan” often gets interpreted as “vegetarian” or simply “no meat.” The reliable approach is to list what you don’t eat: no meat, no fish, no dairy, no eggs. Our free vegan language cards cover this in ten languages.
What should I pack as a vegan traveller?
At minimum: shelf-stable protein, a reusable container, and your language cards. Beyond that it depends on destination and trip length. Our vegan packing list breaks it down by trip type, and the travel snacks guide covers what actually survives being in a bag.
How do you choose which restaurants to recommend?
Restaurants are visited or directly verified, listed with the specific dishes worth ordering, and re-checked at least every six months with a visible verification date. Brands cannot pay for placement. Full detail in our methodology.